Aincrad's Landing
by Racke
Summary: An impossible-looking mountain where there should've been no mountain at all. A chance for release suddenly forever out of reach. And a family of three meeting a Villain.
1. The Transition

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Chapter 1: The Transition

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Disclaimer: I don't own anything.

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Elder Tales was based off of the Half-Gaia project, meaning that the distances between places inside of the game was half the distance between places in real life.

But otherwise – with the exception of whether or not a city was in a certain spot or not – it pretty much followed the real world every step of the way. Which was why the sight of the massive mountain on the horizon, looking like it'd been lodged in the middle of the channel leading out of Tokyo Bay, came as such a shock.

There shouldn't have been a mountain there. It made no sense that there was a mountain there.

Shiroe was in fact paying that distant mountain so much attention that he nearly fell off his gryphon, probably would've if Akatsuki hadn't managed to steady him.

"My lord!" Akatsuki wrestled him back into position, looking quite terrified.

Shiroe didn't pay as much attention to that as he really ought to have done. "Akatsuki, why is there a mountain?"

"My lord?" Akatsuki followed his gaze towards the impossibly gigantic shape on the horizon. "A... mountain?" She shook her head, dismissing her own confusion on the subject. "My lord, concentrate on the now. We can investigate it later."

Shiroe frowned, but nodded. Deliberately not calling Akatsuki out on the fact that she was was clutching onto him with a white-knuckled grip. Neither of them knew what would happen to the gryphon if the one controlling it suddenly fell off of it, but it would likely be an unpleasant experience for both of its riders.

They hadn't seen the mountain when they left for Susukino, which likely had more to do with how it was to the south-east of Akihabara, and they'd needed to go north, than it not being there previously. But now that they were actually looking in that direction from up high, it was quite impossible to miss.

It'd probably rival Mount Fuji in height. No, actually. It looked a lot sharper in the sky than Mount Fuji ever had, so if it was of a similar size across, it'd be even taller than that.

Considering the expansion-pack that had probably started before this whole world-transfer thing had happened, Shiroe would bet a lot of money on that being some kind of new raid-zone. Though it was eerily familiar, despite how out-of-placed it looked.

It was almost as if he could recognize it from-...

Shiroe felt suddenly cold, his face paling as he turned his attention back towards the mountain that was wedged in the channel. No, not a mountain. Shiroe stared at the giant castle that had fallen from the sky.

"Aincrad." He wasn't sure if it was horror or awe in his suddenly hoarse voice, but it was probably a mixture of both.

Akihiko Kayaba's masterpiece. The madman's Death Game. The castle with one hundred Floors, and ten-thousand players forever trapped inside of it.

Akatsuki lunged for the reins as they slipped from his numb fingers, her voice buzzing unheard over the ringing in his ears. The gryphon's flight steadied, even as Shiroe's eyes remained fixed on that impossibly familiar shape in the distance.

The shape of Aincrad, the floating castle of Sword Art Online.

XXX

Kirito gritted his teeth.

Everyone had been forcefully teleported to the First Floor, the teleportation-gates between the Floors no longer worked, and Aincrad was no longer floating in the sky. Hell, the view kind of looked eerily reminiscent of Tokyo Bay, only without Tokyo or any other major city.

The First Floor was also destroyed, as if by an earthquake, the distinct architecture of its floating islands now irrevocably shattered. Considering that the castle itself no longer floated in the sky, Kirito wondered if it had been less of an earthquake and more a result of whatever was keeping them afloat suddenly ceasing to do so.

But there were other things to worry about. Some people were claiming that they'd been killed, that either a monster or a piece of the scenery had managed to kill them, and that instead of dying they'd woken up in the Starting City with the rest of them. There was a rumor rapidly gaining traction that whatever SAO had become since it fell from the sky, it was no longer a Death Game.

It wasn't as if anyone would be willing to try proving it, so the rumor remained a rumor, but the NPCs were acting strangely too. There were more of them than there used to be, thousands, possibly something like three or four NPCs for every Player. And they were behaving like people, even more so than they once used to.

Which didn't even start on the changes in the User-Interface, or the mobs that had changed their attack-patterns, or the graphics that had gone from beyond-compare to identical to real-life, or the fact that Immortal Objects were no longer indestructible. Safe-zones thankfully still remained the same as they'd always been, meaning that – despite the way that _everyone_ had been teleported into the Starting City – the PKers weren't running wild.

Yui was as confused as they were, but considering that she was a little kid, Kirito wasn't really surprised by that. Asuna was trying to get into contact with Heathcliff about what'd happened, but she wasn't getting through. He was still alive though, at least according to her contact-list.

Kirito simply sent a message off to Argo asking for any information she might have. He very deliberately didn't put a price-tag on it. Whatever had happened, SAO had changed, and they needed to know what was going on.

He wouldn't let any crazy new plan of Kayaba's threaten his family.

XXX

"Shiroe, what's Aincrad?" Naotsugu frowned down at him where he'd collapsed in the first place he could find.

"The floating castle." Shiroe answered, but took a deep breath when nobody seemed to recognize it from just that. "It's the name for the floating castle of Sword Art Online."

Nyanta startled, turning towards him with concerned eyes. "You think they were caught too?"

Shiroe shrugged, still feeling kind of terrified. If there were people inside of that mountain-sized castle, and those people were the Players trapped within the first VRMMO on the market-... They would've been in there for nearly two years, endlessly struggling to reach the 100th Floor, desperately hoping that Kayaba could be trusted to at least not lie to them about releasing them once the game had been cleared.

Ten-thousand players had been trapped, but last he remembered, the death-toll had already been over two-thousand. What kind of place was Aincrad? Was it beautiful despite the dangers, or was it just horrific? Had the people inside cracked under the pressure, or were they still trying to fight their way out? Would they blame the Adventurers of Elder Tales for never being able to go back home, when they learned of where the Apocalypse had landed them?

Shiroe still didn't have the faintest clue as to what could've caused the whole thing, but this world was definitely the world of Elder Tales. A world that the SAO-victims wouldn't recognize, wouldn't already love. They would be torn from their only chance of mercy from Kayaba's madness, and thrown into a place from which they'd probably never return.

Did the SAO-players respawn in this world? Or where they like the People? Shiroe couldn't quite decide which one was more terrifying. Their fellow countrymen dying like flies, or a potentially insane force of players with an ax to grind against all the world of Elder Tales and who couldn't be permanently killed and would keep coming no matter what.

He could sort of understand why the People might be terrified of the idea that the Adventurers might declare war on them. If it wasn't for the knowledge that he could respawn too, the latter possibility would've been terrifying.

"It's possible that it just looks like it. It's possible that it's some kind of raid-dungeon done with _really_ bad taste. It's possible that when Elder Tales' servers dragged us into this, SAO somehow got pulled along with us." Shiroe rubbed his temples, frowning. "We don't know what caused this, so it's not like we can really predict what _else_ it might've caused."

"The Noosphere, the expansion." Naotsugu commented with a thoughtful frown of his own.

Shiroe shrugged. "It matches with the time, but it's not like anyone even really knows what it was supposed to be."

Akatsuki pulled on his sleeve. "My lord, should we go there next, or shall we remain here?"

And then there was that, of course. The atmosphere of Akihabara wasn't exactly healthy right now, and even as worried as he was about Aincrad suddenly appearing in the middle of the Uraga Channel – possibly turning Tokyo Bay into a lake instead of a bay, which was sure to cause havoc on any sea-trade that their neighboring cities might do – there were a few ideas bouncing around in his head about what he might try to do to make things better for the Adventurers of this place. And the People, too. They were all victims here.

Shiroe took a deep breath, shooting a small smile at the ninja, before adjusting his glasses. "One foot in front of the other, one step of the time. Whether they truly are the SAO-victims or not, there's nothing we can really do to help them until we can stand on our own two legs. We stay."

Akatsuki nodded, face carefully schooled into neutrality, even as she blushed at the slight motion of his hand. The hand-motion that was their secretly agreed-upon sign for 'thank you', because they'd been traveling for _days_ , and there was definitely a tactical advantage to being able to relay secret and silent messages to each other.

It wasn't exactly an advanced language, if the half-improvised hand-signals could even be called that much. They only had a few handful of words, though even that much would still be useful if they were ever in a situation where they needed to be discreet about what they were doing.

Besides, up until they'd stumbled upon Aincrad at the horizon, the only other thing they'd had to entertain themselves with was Serara's painfully obvious crush on Nyanta. And Nyanta's cooking of course, but their stomachs could regretfully not survive them spending _all_ of their time eating.

So when Akatsuki had made a few aborted attempts to ask for something, Shiroe had had more than enough time to ask her about it. And then he'd gleefully wasted even more time developing an entirely new language from scratch. Just because.

He wasn't that much of a roleplayer himself, but Akatsuki had always seemed to enjoy it, and he didn't mind humoring her. Especially when there were tactical advantages to it.

He just wished that the first sign she'd insisted on developing hadn't been 'my lord'.

XXX

Heathcliff was dead. Nobody was entirely sure how that'd happened, but they'd been able to confirm at least that much, even if his name hadn't been automatically struck from the Monument. There simply was no way they wouldn't have been able to reach him or locate him after over a week of searching.

The leading theory was that he'd somehow been killed in the middle of the Transition, which had caused the glitch in the User-Interface of 'being alive' whilst 'not being anywhere' to those who had him on their friend-lists, and that the Monument no longer registered whether a had Player died or not.

But Heathcliff's death meant that Asuna was suddenly the highest ranked commander of the Knights of the Blood, one of the highest-ranking Clearer-guilds there was – only partially matched by the Divine Dragon Alliance, and that was actually a point of contention. And even if she'd technically resigned from it before the Transition had happened, she wasn't going to let them tear themselves apart without a leader.

The Aincrad Liberation Force – being the main force amongst those of the middle Floors – were keeping the peace between Players and NPCs admirably, and most of the other mid-Floor guilds were following its lead. As for the Clearer-guilds, not even the DDA wanted to openly challenge the decisions of the Knights of the Blood – though that might change in due time, as things settled down somewhat – which meant that a large portion of them were gearing up to go hunt down the Red Players that'd managed to escape their prison-cells in the Transition.

It wasn't like they could send mid-liners up against Laughing Coffin.

But still, with Kirito by her side, carrying Yui along with him, the rumors of Kirito's marriage to Asuna became more-or-less confirmed by the people who still found time to gossip. Though there was a lot of talk about exactly how they'd ended up with a daughter after something like a month's worth of vacation.

Kirito very deliberately didn't think about how the new User-Interface titled Yui much the same as it titled NPCs. She was one of the People of Aincrad, whereas he along with every other Player he'd met were titled as an Adventurer of Aincrad.

Whether Yui had been an NPC, or a quest, or something else entirely, she was their daughter and he wasn't going to allow anyone to claim otherwise. Not that anyone seemed to have any interest in doing so.

During the hunt for PKers, it was also officially confirmed that Adventurers respawned, whereas the People didn't. They could put that discovery down to a few members of Laughing Coffin who didn't want to come quietly.

Thankfully, the prisons still worked perfectly fine as they were, and the fact that the PKers couldn't be killed permanently meant that at least arguments surrounding the ethics of how to deal with murderers were at an all-time low. Nobody wanted them to run free, and prison-cells was apparently the only way to make sure of it, so into prison they went.

There'd also been some clamor about food tasting like cardboard, until someone had figured out the problem and sent out a message to everyone through Argo about how they were supposed to bodily prepare the food in this new system.

After that, not a lot happened.

The teleportation-gates between Floors were still down, and they had no idea how to either get them up and running or how to bypass their necessity. There were people who'd kept most everything stored away in their homes, which they now couldn't access, so there'd been some heated arguments about it. At least, until nearly two weeks after the Transition when someone in the Fuurinkazan had pointed out that they could just take the stairs.

It wasn't like the Floor Bosses respawned, and the dungeons up until the mid-Floors were almost pathetically easy to traverse for anyone who was at the level of a Clearer. Noticeably, this meant that there were suddenly a whole bunch of escort-missions between Floors, but by then the PKers had already been rounded back up through the combined force of the Clearer-guilds and Argo's information-network.

It wasn't that things went back to normal. 'Normal' would mean that the Clearers threw themselves back into preparing themselves for the next Floor Boss, and considering the changes to the game, nobody really believed that Kayaba had any power here. Which meant that they wouldn't be released once they reached the top, so there wasn't really any point in aiming for it.

Most people tried to ignore that though, and things settled into something like a routine.

At least they weren't on a time-clock anymore, because Kirito was pretty damn sure that whatever had happened during the Transition, Aincrad was no longer a creation of electronics. This was a place of flesh, which meant that their bodies were no longer effectively comatized and at the mercy of the hospital-staff and the Japanese government.

They were free, even if they were trapped.

Kirito smiled slightly as Yui made a face after trying to eat something spicy again. There were definitely worse places to be trapped in.

XXX

Shiroe smiled as the faces of the guild-leaders around him paled, only now realizing what he'd done.

Five million gold he'd asked from them, and in return he'd given them a weapon capable of forcing even the strongest battle-oriented guild to heel under the laws of the Round Table. It wasn't an unfair deal, as far as he was concerned, but it hadn't been one they'd even considered previously, nor a deal that they'd technically agreed to.

He hadn't lied, but assumptions were what they were, and it wasn't that hard to pull their strings when he knew their personality-types like the back of his hand. He was a gamer too, after all.

Arranging for the timing to coincide had been harder. He couldn't afford the guilty party to realize what he'd done before he'd managed to free the new players from them. Otherwise they'd just leave, taking those innocents with them. And he couldn't allow that. Not when he'd already failed Minori and Tohya by not going looking for them at the start of this whole mess.

So he smiled, because it was so very satisfying when a plan clicked into place, and the dawning horror appeared on the faces of his enemies.

He supposed that was why they called him the Villain in Glasses.

XXX

Kirito was pretty sure that whoever had thought up this idea had been insane.

Not just the concept of implementing it and all the work that'd gone into that side of things, or the certainty that there was no way that connecting the Floors like this would be worth the effort they'd had to put into it. After all, it'd taken them nearly two whole weeks of work to finish only the one elevator. But it was also a good indication of the inventor's insanity because of the sheer near-suicidal madness that must've possessed someone into thinking that it'd be a sensible idea to actually _use_ it.

Even so, Klein certainly seemed enthusiastic about trying it out.

Kirito lifted Yui a bit higher so that she could see past the crowd of curious onlookers. "Yui, say something nice to Klein, okay? It might be the last time you'll ever see him." He told his daughter in a voice designed to carry.

"Oi! Quit writing me off as dead, Kirito!" Klein glared at him from where he was meticulously strapping himself in.

"Bye, Klein!" Yui waved with a innocently cheerful smile. "You're sure to grow up into a handsome man someday!"

Even Kirito winced at that. His daughter was a natural, cruelly piercing straight through the heart with ruthless efficiency.

Klein's head drooped, and he made a despairing noise that probably meant that he wasn't very appreciative of the 'compliment'. Considering that he was already a 'grown up man', that was kind of to be expected.

Truly, Yui was the best and most talented daughter in the world.

Still, the two of them waved cheerfully as the rickety elevator lifted off the ground, Klein's face disappearing from sight as it rapidly ascended towards the sky-like ceiling of the First Floor. If everything went to plan, this would be a common sight in a few days, increasing the mobility between Floors and freeing the Clearers up from endlessly escorting people back and forth through the dungeons surrounding the Floor Boss areas.

For the first time since the Transition, nearly five weeks ago, contact was officially established between two Floors, without anyone having to brave the Floor Boss dungeons.

It was an ambitious plan, and whoever came up with the idea of building an open-to-air elevator by cutting a hole in the floor of the Second Floor was at the very least not scared of heights. Kirito had to tip his metaphorical hat and admit that much at least.

Even if they were definitely insane.

XXX

Unlike a great many others, Shiroe hadn't been all that surprised at the procession of the People that showed up at Akiba's gates, demanding an audience with the leader of the Round Table by the authority of the leader of Eastal.

Admittedly, he hadn't really paid enough attention to the flavor text to immediately recognize who they were talking about, but then he wasn't entirely sure if they'd existed as actual NPCs to visit when everything had been a game. That was his excuse, and he was sticking to it.

It made sense that the Round Table would be challenged by the local government of the People of the Land. They were after all a miniature government designed to keep Adventurers within Akiba in line, and the People would no doubt love to have them under their thumb.

Not that that would've helped much, considering how fluidly independent most guilds really were. Everyone did what they wanted, and if the guild disapproved, it was easy to just leave the guild without anyone really holding grudges. That was the way it'd worked when Elder Tales had been a game, and it probably wasn't going to change overly much now.

Perhaps the fragility of the guild-system had been part of why Shiroe had been avoiding guilds for all this time, considering what it'd been like to watch the Debauchery Tea Party split up. It's hard to join a group of friends when you're fully convinced you'll only know them for a few months at best.

Part of that fluidity in guild-membership had changed with them being trapped in this world, mainly based around the knowledge that at least nobody could disappear without a word on behalf of 'quitting the game' or 'real life getting stressful'. Which was probably no small part in why he'd finally managed to push past his own distaste of guilds and formed Log Horizon.

He was still a little bit amazed that people were willing to follow his orders outside of a battle, setting him up as the leader they placed all of their faith in. Akatsuki's decision to extend their sign-language even further to account for the new situations they faced-...

The worst part was that even when Shiroe tried to pretend that Akatsuki's sign for 'my lord' was actually her sign for 'Shiroe', the ninja would know. Shiroe wasn't sure how she knew, but she always knew, and she always responded by frowning at him and _audibly_ calling him 'lord'.

His little ninja was a spiteful little bundle of stubborn loyalty.

Still, with an invitation to the People's capital of Maihama, things were beginning to change.

They still hadn't heard anything about Aincrad, the mountain of a castle that was in all likelihood blocking all of the sea-trade of the neighboring cities. Which either meant that very few people had access to either flight – or a good lookout-position – that were necessary for seeing it on the horizon, or the People of the Land believed that it'd always been there and that it as such didn't need to be spoken of.

Shiroe was leaning towards the former option, but it was entirely possible that he was wrong on that. Either way, once they reached Maihama they'd be getting information on it one way or the other.

Akatsuki was very good at finding out about things that nobody wanted to tell them of.

XXX

"A mountain blocking the exit of the bay?" Crusty frowned over at him. "You think it has to do with the expansion?"

Shiroe adjusted his glasses, perfectly aware that he now had the attention of the entire group that had been sent to Maihama. "I hope that it does, because if it isn't then I'm not sure I want to see it."

Akatsuki fidgeted silently in her corner as everyone's eyes narrowed suspiciously at him, knowing what she did about his conclusions, she kept her silence.

"There's something you're not telling us." Crusty said, though it was probably more of a command than an observation.

"Almost two years ago now, I considered buying a new game, but I hesitated at the last minute." Shiroe took a deep breath. "I remember the trailers for it quite well. They gave me nightmares for weeks. And that mountain out there? That looks an awful lot like the floating castle of Sword Art Online."

Silence. Everyone's face slipping in between disbelieving and sudden worry.

"You think that the SAO-victims could've ended up here in this world, with us?" Michitaka frowned.

Shiroe shrugged. "I don't know enough about how _we_ ended up here to make any predictions either way, but if the only thing needed for a player to be included in the Apocalypse was to be logged in-... well, they've been logged in to _their_ game for nearly two years straight, now."

"But you don't know for certain." Crusty nodded. "Which is why you are asking the People."

"It _is_ entirely possible that it was designed to be a crass joke of some sort." Shiroe sighed, leaning back in his chair. "But it's a bit out-of-character for how Elder Tales generally does things, even if I'd honestly be much happier to hear that the whole place is just a weirdly designed raid-dungeon."

"If there are other people from our world there, what do we do?" Henrietta asked the question on everyone's minds.

"Talk to them, make sure they're not going to go on some kind of rampage and cause a war." Crusty said pragmatically. "Maybe see if anyone in Akiba lost someone to the SAO-Incident, as well."

Shiroe clapped his hands, interrupting further discussion. "And that's about all we can decide without more information on the subject. But we should probably hurry, we've been here for over three months now, and we have no idea what they're dealing with."

Personally, the largest reason Shiroe had been willing to sit on the information about Aincrad's presence on the horizon for as long as he had, was almost entirely down to that complete lack of information.

It was entirely possible that the People of the Land had made contact with Aincrad within the first few weeks of them being stranded in this world, and had built perfectly friendly relationships with them. It was however, also possible that the People had been trying very hard to ignore that something had cut off all of their routes for sea-trade. And Shiroe had never been the kind of person to rush into a situation without having some clue about where he was going.

Sure, they might've been able to rush over to help, but that kind of thing could've easily ended up causing even more issues for the SAO-players. After all, even if they somehow managed to figure out who to help and how to do so, there could've easily been some _very_ unpleasant culture-clashes.

Elder Tales had PKers, and they were mainly referred to as 'griefers'. Annoying and somewhat detestable individuals who made a profit from the suffering of others. SAO probably had PKers too, but considering that death had for them – at least previously, who knew if anything on that front had changed – been permanent and violent, they'd probably interpret those PKers as 'murderers' instead of nuisances.

Considering that Akiba had been having PK-related issues right outside of its city-limits until the Round Table had been firmly established, the SAO-players might've reacted hostile to all Adventurers simply be association.

No. Waiting had been the best option, Shiroe was sure of it. Solidify the ground under their own feet, and then investigate all possibilities, before making a move.

That didn't mean that the others were going to be happy with him for withholding information like this, but he'd been hoping that this trip to the capital would easily dismiss all of his worries and allow him to scrap the idea that that mountain out there truly was Aincrad.

Unfortunately, he hadn't found anything like that at all. So he'd had to come clean about his suspicions on the matter, and now everyone were worried.

The SAO-victims had been trapped inside of a Death Game for nearly two years running, and who knew if the people still in there were even sane anymore? It was entirely possible that they'd devolved into some kind of corrupt tribal-system where slavery was considered a perfectly normal thing.

It probably wasn't very likely that that specific scenario had happened, but the simple fact of the matter was that they _didn't know_. Nobody knew. That'd been half the terror of the ones left behind, the understanding that even if the victims miraculously escaped, there was a high chance that they'd never speak about what had happened in there, or that even if they talked the non-victims wouldn't be able to comprehend it at all.

Shiroe rubbed his temples and sent a brief signal of reassurance towards Akatsuki. The 'reveal' had gone over as well as he could've hoped, even if they weren't very happy with him right now for withholding it for this long.

She signaled back an acceptance of how the situation could've turned out a lot worse, before tacking on a 'my lord' to show that she'd continue to defer to him. Which was oddly reassuring, even if it still made him want to sigh at how she continued to call him that.

If it weren't for the fact that he was perfectly capable of matching her every step of the way, Shiroe might've been a little bit disturbed by how dedicated the ninja was to her role as his loyal servant.

It takes a special kind of madness to invent a sign-language on a bit over a week's worth of travel-time out of sheer boredom. Though Shiroe was still blaming Akatsuki for giving him the idea in the first place.

XXX

Nearly seven weeks into figuring out how everything worked, and the Adventurers of Aincrad had started to get bored.

They'd reconnected a few of the Floors through elevators, and most everyone had been able to return back to whatever home they'd made for themselves in SAO. A few had decided to move to different Floors, in order to be able to reach their friends and workplaces easier, and most everyone had reached some kind of equilibrium.

But that just meant that people were starting to realize that there wasn't a lot to do. There was no point in trying to Clear Aincrad anymore, since – even if Kayaba could somehow detect it – the madman wouldn't be able to change things one way or the other once they made it to the 100th Floor.

And without that, everything else kind of tumbled away after it. There was no real need to go farming for materials when they didn't desperately need the best gear in the game, there was no real point in grinding for levels in order to continue pushing everyone forward into freedom, and without any of that people were left to simply wander around aimlessly.

Until someone got the bright idea that they really had two things they could do. One, explore the land that Aincrad had 'landed on'. And two, finish clearing the Floors to see what the 100th Floor was like.

Since nobody wanted to risk abandoning Aincrad or getting lost somewhere outside without a way back home, most everyone agreed that perhaps they ought to focus on Clearing the last few Floors.

Kirito personally believed that the Final Floor would be an empty space, possibly just a large platform on top of the whole of Aincrad, maybe with a big flag of Kayaba's smug face on it. There just wouldn't really have been any point in developing the 100th Floor any further than that if Kayaba had simply been planning on using it as the finish-line to release them from SAO.

Then again, considering Kayaba's personality, it was entirely possible that there was some huge plot-twist planned for that moment, and in that case it might be kind of interesting to see it.

The 75th Floor Boss was kind of a dick to fight, what with being damn-near unblockable and capable of outrunning pretty much everyone. But since the scouting team actually survived – even if they'd technically had to respawn to do that – they'd already known a bit of its move-set and been able to plan accordingly. So even if it likely would've been an utter terror in SAO, whatever this place was now, it'd been kind of lackluster.

Turns out, Boss Fights without the threat of imminent death were actually kind of funny. It was like they could finally have revenge on all of the previous Floor Bosses who'd killed their friends. Not to mention the adrenaline mixing with the annoyance of respawning and the wonderful feeling of being perfectly safe, all combined into a very cathartic experience.

So, three days later – they'd been over-leveled anyway – they went through the 76th Floor Boss too. That one was actually weaker, proving again that the Floor Bosses had been working on a 25-Floor interval of really difficult Bosses.

By the twelfth week since the Transition, they'd reached the 90th Floor.

And they weren't planning to stop climbing.

XXX

Shiroe frowned. They'd all been worrying about Aincrad's existence to one degree or another, but with the emergence of the Goblin King, it was becoming glaringly obvious that they didn't really have the time to investigate it.

They might be able to send someone to check it out, but there weren't exactly a lot of people Shiroe would trust to be diplomatic enough for the job if Aincrad really _was_ populated with the SAO-victims. At least, nobody who wasn't already occupied with the diplomatic side of things in Maihama, or keeping the Round Table running smoothly back in Akiba, or out with the new players at the training camp.

Once everything got sorted out and the Adventurers could set out to kill the Goblin King without submitting to the authority of the People, then most of those people capable of investigating Aincrad would be even busier with either leading or planning what basically amounted to a small war.

As for confirmation of Aincrad's nature, ReGan was of some help there. He clearly didn't seem to consider the 'mountain in the channel' to be part of their world, even if he wasn't entirely certain as to the nature of it. Which meant that it likely wasn't part of any expansion.

Everything seemed to point towards the mountain of a castle truly being Aincrad. But apparently the People from all of Yamato had been decidedly nervous about approaching it, possibly thinking it to be a raid-dungeon or something similar. They weren't exactly happy with its placement, what with it interrupting their sea-trade, but no ship wanted to sail over and give it a closer examination.

For a little bit longer, at least until the armies of the Goblin King had been crippled, they weren't going to be making any headway in regards to the mystery that was Aincrad's existence. Even if it gnawed at Shiroe to abandon people who could very well be in desperate need of help.

XXX

 **A/n: I started writing this in the middle of editing the Epilogue for "A Ninja's Parents". So yeah, I've been unusually productive about finishing it. Even if I got interrupted by a** _ **really**_ **busy week when it came down to editing the full story.**

 **As for the hand-signals... You can blame Vathara's "Dislocation" for that one.**


	2. Diplomacy

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Chapter 2: Diplomacy

XXX

Disclaimer: I don't own anything.

XXX

In the end, it wasn't Shiroe who decided that they needed to make contact with Aincrad, but instead the decision of one of the crafting guilds.

Or rather, as said crafting guild argued, in order to transport their troops to aid the Adventurers who would be fighting at the town of Choushi, they needed to take the sea-route rather than the land-route. And that meant that they'd need to move their ships past Aincrad. They weren't even entirely sure if there was enough open water between the 'bay' and the sea for them to move through it, so if their plans of a pincer-movement against the Goblin King's armies were to be realized, they needed to make contact with Aincrad.

Hopefully, there'd be something like a river for their ships to pass through, but considering the combined strength-stat of several hundred Adventurers, they should be able to haul the ship out of the water and over the land until it could safely be pushed back into the sea.

There were plenty of historical records of that kind of bypass having been done before, and even if the Ocypete – being steam-powered and built mostly out of steel – was probably ridiculously heavy in comparison to the ships spoken of in history, the people back then wouldn't have had access to the ridiculous strength of the Adventurers. So Shiroe sincerely believed that they'd have a good chance of pulling it off without any true concerns.

However, bringing up a ship loaded with an army straight past Aincrad, without ever actually making contact with the people who might live there? The people who'd possibly survived horrors and death for nearly two years before whatever had happened to Elder Tales?

It sounded like the kind of idea that was highly likely to end up being classified as an act of war, and Shiroe _really_ didn't want to poke a population of people who could very well be the local equivalent of Rambo. With all of the desperate trauma and ruthless violence that such a comparison contained.

No, better to send someone off on a diplomatic trip with due haste, even if the person they sent would've ordinarily been better off doing something else in preparation for the battle.

Naturally, being the kind of person that he was, Crusty dumped the whole thing in Shiroe's lap with a smile and a mention of how 'Shiroe had a gryphon so it wouldn't slow him down'.

One day, Shiroe was going to make Crusty suffer for what the man kept putting him through. Until then though, he supposed that it was best to focus on the task at hand. And Shiroe was probably one of the Adventurer who'd kept up-to-date with the SAO-incident the most, so in all likelihood he was actually the best person for the job.

But, even so, one of these days he would definitely have his revenge.

Akatsuki shifted a little bit behind him on the gryphon, apparently a little bit confused at his shift in mood, as Shiroe chuckled darkly in anticipation of that treasured moment of exquisite vengeance.

XXX

Fifteen Floor Bosses in five weeks.

It'd been an impossible pace, and not only because the battles started to blur together something fiercely, or because they hadn't been fighting through the Floor dungeons whilst mapping them out as much as they'd been recklessly running through them trying to find the Boss Room. It was simply that, on top of all of that, they'd exhausted their safety-margin, and had reached the point where they might actually be considered under-leveled for fighting the Floor Bosses.

They couldn't continue, because they simply didn't have the levels necessary to keep on climbing.

It wasn't until nearly two weeks after reaching the 90th Floor before anyone even made an attempt at the next Floor Boss, and everyone were relieved to note that at least this time they managed to kill it on their first try, and didn't even have to suffer through half of the Players going down in the attempt.

A far cry from the previous one, that'd had – out of over a hundred participants, and on the second try – four survivors in total.

Without the threat of permanent death looming over them every step of the way, a lot of Players had scrambled for a place at the front-line. At the same time, a few of the Clearers had retired from it, not capable of handling the idea of watching people die around them – even if it wasn't permanent anymore.

Kirito had very nearly been one of those latter people. The only reason he _wasn't_ , was because Asuna wouldn't have joined him in his retirement this time around. And he couldn't let her walk into battle alone, not without at least trying to help.

He wasn't sure if it was him being arrogant, or something else, but the idea of not being by Asuna's side in a battle gave him nightmares. And really, if he had to choose between nightmares and nightmares, he might as well be productive about it.

Still, there'd been some interesting rumors during the last two weeks of level-grinding. Rumors about mysterious Unique Skills being suddenly unlocked. Skills that were supposedly comparable to his own Dual Wield, though Kirito hadn't seen anyone actually use any of them. Yet.

It was possible that it might be related to the Transition, but Kirito wouldn't have put it past Kayaba to have arranged for special skills to start being unlocked during the 'final push' towards the 100th Floor.

Trying to anticipate Kayaba's madness was something that most everyone had long since given up on, however. And the actual source of the change was likely largely irrelevant.

New Unique Skills had been unlocked, and it was entirely possible that even more new changes in the game-mechanics were incoming. But they'd been surprised before, and they'd likely be surprised again, so there wasn't much use in worrying about it.

Still, they were in the middle of celebrating finally reaching the 91st Floor when someone in the crowd first spotted the strange little spot over the horizon. A spot that grew larger as it approached, and very much didn't look at all like a bird.

XXX

At its base, Aincrad had a ring of protrusions ending in large obelisks of some type.

Shiroe vaguely remembering it being very fantastical-looking when the castle had been floating in the sky, but as it was it instead looked almost normal. It actually reminded him of a harbor of some sort, seeing how the pier-like structures were almost the perfect height for a ship to dock at.

Still, those things were probably his best bet for a landing, seeing as he didn't want to try landing inside of Aincrad itself.

More interesting was the sight of a bunch of small shapes moving around the edges of it all, peering up at him warily.

They definitely looked like people, which meant that this probably wasn't a raid-dungeon, not that Shiroe had really held out much hope for that to be the case. Briefly signaling a 'be wary' combined with a 'be nice' towards Akatsuki, Shiroe braced himself for the landing and tried to think of how best to explain everything that'd happened since the events of the Apocalypse without ending up sounding either like a loony or like someone to blame for it.

The landing was as soft as he could really hope for, and he slid out of the saddle with the grace of long practice that he technically hadn't ever really possessed. Say what you will for the mind-mess of it all, but it was definitely useful to remember how to move in their new bodies, even if their minds weren't entirely aware of it.

Glancing around the surrounding people, he caught more than a glimpse of 'Adventurer' in their titles. Though it was weird how the few 'People' he could see weren't 'People of the Land', but rather 'People of Aincrad'. Just like the 'Adventurers' were actually 'Adventurers of Aincrad'.

An interesting distinction to keep in mind for the future. There had to be a reason to it, after all. Though it might simply have to do with SAO's flavor-text somehow being just as relevant as Elder Tales'. Considering that they _were_ in Aincrad, Shiroe was going to admit that that made a certain amount of sense.

Still, this wasn't the time for academical curiosity. And he should probably try to make this sound as official as possible. "I'm Shiroe of Log Horizon, member and representative of the Round Table of Akihabara. I wish to speak with your leader."

XXX

"Papa, who's that?"

The voice was that of a young girl, and when Shiroe surreptitiously glanced towards it, he did indeed find one. An innocent-looking prepubescent girl sitting on the shoulders of a male teenager, whom she was apparently calling 'papa'. Which was weird because Shiroe could see that the girl was one of the People, whilst the boy was an Adventurer, not to mention that she was much too old for him to be her actual father.

Not that he was going to mention that, since he had no idea what was considered 'normal' for this place. There was really no need to go picking fights when there might be enough hostility as it was.

"He's the man that mama is supposed to talk to." The boy answered the girl, voice and expression perfectly at ease and almost lazy, but eyes dangerously sharp as the boy kept Shiroe and Akatsuki in his peripheral view at all times.

So 'mama' was one of their leaders? Did that mean that one of the People were leading Aincrad, or did it mean that two Adventurers had adopted one of the People as their daughter? Either way, there was no point in thinking too hard about it. It'd be revealed in time, he was sure.

Akatsuki shifted behind him, clearly aware of the boy's scrutiny. In fact, from-...

Shiroe felt his face twist into a small frown of confusion as Akatsuki made a signal that was something like 'numbers', her eyes a little bit wide. Glancing back towards the boy and his 'daughter', Shiroe blinked as he realized what Akatsuki had been so surprised by.

The boy's level was over the level-cap of 100.

Actually, no. There were _several_ Adventurers around them whose levels were above the supposed level-cap of Elder Tales. Not always by much, and none of them were above it with more than ten levels, that he could see. But enough for it to be glaringly obvious that either the citizens of Aincrad followed an entirely different level-system, or the expected raising of the level-cap that should've come with the expansion was in fact something very different.

No Adventurer of Elder Tales would've had time to reach level 100 yet, so whether that was the new level-cap – as it'd been advertised – or just another level to climb and overcome-... Shiroe didn't know, and he doubted he'd hear about it for a good long while yet.

However, the game-mechanics surrounding the merge of these two worlds weren't what this meeting was about. It was about the Adventurers of Akihabara, their war against the Goblin King, and the actions necessary to protect the People of the Land during it. So he carefully filed those thoughts away for further study at a later time.

Their escort finally showed them towards a door, which opened to reveal a small assembly of people.

Shiroe could see guild-marks attached to their names, and it seemed like everyone in there had a different one. So, this was Aincrad's own version of the Round Table? Or was it something more like a war-council?

"I'm Asuna of the Knights of the Blood." A young woman in white and red said, standing in front of the others, her face serious. "Where did you come from, and what is your purpose here?"

Considering the blunt introduction from her side, and the lack of one from the others, Shiroe got the distinct feeling that this woman would definitely stab him to death if he didn't get to the point. She had that kind of no-nonsense aura about her, and none of the others seemed to be taking offense with it, so she was likely either their current spokesperson or the one unofficially in charge of the whole lot of them.

Best to be polite.

"I'm Shiroe. I was sent by the Round Table of Akihabara in order to seek passage through your lands for the sake of defending the eastern coast from the armies of the Goblin King." Shiroe nearly winced at how that ended up coming out. It was probably a bit too blunt.

Asuna didn't say anything to interrupt him however, even if her eyes narrowed dangerously.

"In order to stop the Goblin King's attacks against Eastal, we need to cripple its armies. The only way to do so without massive civilian casualties is by using a pincer-attack, meaning that time is somewhat of the essence." He nodded to the seated members of the rest of the council. "We have no intentions of involving you in this war, and the battlefield is quite some distance north-east of here so you shouldn't be affected regardless." He hastened to reassure them.

"So why do your armies need to pass through _here_?" One of the members spoke up, not introducing himself.

Shiroe carefully filed away the lack of an introduction, carefully deciding not to try to analyze it just yet. Mapping out the intricacies of their internal politics was not the purpose for his presence, even if it might come in handy at a later date. "In order to reach the eastern end of the battlefield in time, we need to take the sea-route. The sea-route which just so happens to have Aincrad placed right on top of it." Shiroe frowned slightly. "The water north of here used to be a bay with easy access to the sea. However, with Aincrad's current location, it'd be better classified as a lake."

"Do you have a map of the area in question?" Asuna took charge once again.

Shiroe nodded, having expected as much, and presented her with the map in question. The map which had 'Shibuya' and 'Akihabara' clearly marked on it. And even if there was nothing labeled 'Tokyo', it was blatantly obvious to anyone who looked that that was what the area it covered.

Elder Tales was designed with the world-map in mind, after all. And it stood to reason that the SAO-victims would recognize the capital of their own country.

The map also helpfully showed just how crippled their sea-route had been by Aincrad's appearance in the middle of the channel out of the bay, as well as marking the place where Ocypete was supposed to make land after passing through. Shiroe had even been extra helpful and marked out where the armies of the Goblin King were on the map, and a rough outline of how they'd been planning to corner them.

"How accurate is this map?" Asuna asked, showing off a very impressive poker face.

"Quite accurate." Shiroe was in fact rather proud of it, having drawn it himself as a master scribe.

Asuna nodded, face still blank. "What ever happened to Tokyo, Shiroe-san?"

Shiroe sighed, taking the question for what it was – a rather blatant probe to see if they shared their country of origin. "It's probably still there, back on Earth." He shrugged, ignoring how everyone in the room had tensed noticeably. "I doubt that whatever fantastical power brought us here caused any actual damage to that place." He frowned, suddenly remembering something that had slipped his mind for quite some time. "Though, I might've accidentally burnt down my apartment building if I really didn't turn off the stove-..."

Akatsuki shoved an elbow into his side, breaking him out of the slowly dawning, dazed horror that had kind of made him freeze up at the thought that he might've inadvertently hurt a lot of people.

Shiroe signaled a quick 'thanks' to Akatsuki and took a deep breath to steady himself. "As far as we've been able to determine at this time, the world we're currently in is the world of Elder Tales. A fairly old MMO. The timing seems to have coincided with the launching of a new expansion, though it's possible that that's coincidental. The People, who were once NPCs, are now perfectly sentient individuals, and this world shares a player-affected history and events with the actual game. As of yet, that's really all that we know."

Asuna stared at him for a moment longer, before nodding. "I see."

"Wow. We've got to be having the worst string of bad luck that's ever been recorded." A third member of the small council slumped back in his seat. He sniffed. "God, I miss pizza."

Shiroe couldn't help the small smirk curling his lips. "I have it on good authority that it isn't all that difficult to make."

The man straightened in his seat, his jaw slowly dropping. "Y-You-... You're telling me that you can make pizza here?!" He leapt to his feet, turning to the young woman with glee on his face. "Asuna-san, you-!"

"Sit. Down. Klein." She growled out at him.

Klein meekly returned to his seat, pouting.

The discussion got a little bit more complicated from there.

XXX

Asuna slumped down on the couch next to him with an exhausted sound. "I hate politics."

Kirito smiled, shifting slightly to make Asuna leaning into him a little bit more comfortable for both of them. "And that's why I'm a solo-player."

Asuna grunted and halfheartedly shoved an elbow into his side. "Half the meeting was just everyone trying to figure out if they should be pointing fingers or not. And then the other half was people trying to figure out how far they could push each other by _threatening_ to point fingers."

"Riveting." Kirito nodded sagely.

Asuna groaned. "I swear, Klein was like a beacon of hope."

Kirito winced, far too aware of how annoying his friend could be when the man set his mind to it. Being locked in with a bunch of stuffy people arguing politics sounded like an absolutely _horrible_ place to make Klein act seriously. So if he was a 'beacon of hope', Asuna must've been inches away from trying to shove someone's face through a wall for being insanely obnoxious.

Wrapping his arm around his wife's shoulders, Kirito hummed thoughtfully as he considered what he'd seen of Shiroe.

He'd had good eyes on him, even if he reminded Kirito more of a librarian than a warrior. The girl trailing after him on the other hand seemed perfectly suitable to be called 'ninja'. Sharp eyes and silent steps, remaining in Shiroe's shadow but somehow noble in her own way.

Perhaps most interesting was that the two of them had had 'classes' to their names, and that they'd both been 'Adventurers' whereas the SAO-players were all 'Adventurers of Aincrad'. All things considered, Kirito would guess that they had a very different leveling-systems.

On top of that, Shiroe was an 'enchanter', which would suggest that this world had magic in it. Not just mythical beasts or old tales of great magics shaping the world, but magical artifacts and offensive spells. Which Aincrad was sorely lacking in.

That actually made Kirito a little bit nervous. Sure, he doubted that any other RPG-system would ever ingrain its players with as much skill with a blade as SAO had demanded of its players, but most of those games usually had _some_ kind of knight-class to go along with the numerous magic classes.

And, more importantly, Elder Tales probably also had healers and support-classes to go along with their long-distance DPS-classes. And the variations within the SAO-player's basically amounted to hitting people with slightly different kind of swords.

It was hard to say who'd emerge victorious from that kind of fight, considering that this world still operated on HP-principles, rather than the instant-death of their home-reality. It really came down to whether or not the SAO-players would be equal to or better than the knights of this world, or if they could compare to other classes as well.

Most MMOs worked to balance their class-systems by giving them a 'rock-paper-scissors'-approach, and if the SAO-players fell into being the equal of only one of those classes, then they'd be destroyed the moment they got into any sort of large-scale conflict. Since it'd mean that the enemies of this world would be able to simply fill their ranks with whatever class they had a weakness to, and then crush them underfoot.

Hopefully, it would never come to that, but Kirito hadn't survived SAO for as long as he had without learning to keep a wary eye on potential dangers. And 'other people' was unfortunately always going to be a potential danger, one way or the other.

The fact that this world apparently had reasons for an entire army to mobilize against threats? Well, that just meant that they needed to figure out the local politics as quickly as possible.

"A naval battle, huh?" Kirito mused thoughtfully.

"No. Just transportation." Asuna sighed. "Apparently Safe Zones in this world aren't a 'law of the universe' like it is in Aincrad, but are instead enforced by some kind of elite NPC-guards. So they actually need to defend their towns from monsters."

Kirito nodded, having heard some of it briefly mentioned before, and absently switching tracks as his mind wandered. "I think we're going to need to form some kind of government that includes the People of Aincrad."

"Probably." Asuna agreed, twisting around so that she could use his lap as a pillow and stretch out properly over the couch. "But they don't much care about anything outside of their respective Floors, so it'll probably be annoying as all hell."

"You're putting Klein in charge of it, aren't you?" Kirito smiled, looking down at her.

Asuna's eyes sparkled with barely restrained glee. "'Meet interesting new people', 'talk to lots of different cute girls'. Please, he'll be _begging_ me to put him in charge of it."

Kirito stared at her with a slightly stunned expression. "Asuna, you-... you're the _best_."

"I know." Asuna grinned smugly up at him, before hooking an arm around his neck and pulling him downwards into a kiss.

XXX

They had permission to bring their army past Aincrad, and so far they hadn't reached the point where people really started looking for a scapegoat.

In fact – despite how the SAO-players had apparently reached three-quarters of the way to the top before the Apocalypse had happened – they didn't seem to care about the Apocalypse as much as Shiroe had expected them to. Perhaps it was simple that they'd been trapped in Aincrad for long enough that they'd all built their own lives for themselves. Lives that they would've been forced to abandon upon the completion of the game.

They probably wouldn't have minded that, to abandon their makeshift society in order to return to their families and loved ones outside. But since they no longer had the link to that place through their comatose bodies, and they really didn't have a way back home-...

For some of them, it probably hadn't really dawned on them that there was no escape from this new world. They'd after all grown used to having the goal of 'clearing the game' to cling to, so they might just continue doing that until they'd finished, even if the escape that they'd been promised no longer applied.

But for the others? For those who knew perfectly well that there was no way back to Japan, and who still weren't visually affected by it? Shiroe was guessing that those people had already eked out their own lives and livelihoods and friends and families over the years that they'd been trapped within SAO. Lives that would've been interrupted just as harshly by them actually clearing the game, and lives that they would've likely hesitated to abandon.

In comparison to the situation of Akihabara, Aincrad had already survived its own depression, and the ones who remained had at least learned how to distract themselves from their misery.

But still, from what little he'd heard, in the fourteen weeks since the Apocalypse, the 'Clearers' had pushed through a total of sixteen more Floors. That was an impressive leap in efficiency, in comparison to taking nearly two years to reach where they'd been before. And that experience meant that they'd likely been extremely cautious about challenging the new Bosses.

Shiroe couldn't really imagine what that must've been like. As far as he was concerned, a raid-boss was something you challenged and was killed by, so that you'd know how to avoid being killed the next time around. It wasn't something you could really make plans for without knowing exactly what you were up against, and yet that's what the Clearers had done.

Admittedly, from what he'd heard, most of those Bosses were fairly static, using bladed-weapons of various sorts, with semi-predictable attack-patterns to go along with it, even if they were still terrifying to fight. Kayaba seemed to believe that ruling as a god over a bunch of innocents would be less amusing if they all managed to get themselves killed without ever experiencing the entirety of Aincrad.

Still, the Aincrad version of the Round Table seemed like a pretty decent group of people. They wanted information, and were willing to trade for it.

There was definitely a hint of fierce independence there, but that was to be expected considering how long they'd been on their own. And though they could be harsh in their unusually blunt manners, there was a spark of life there that reminded Shiroe a lot of his own guild.

He got the distinct feeling that Asuna and Akatsuki might've gotten along fabulously if they'd met in a less formal environment. If for no other reason then that they'd both cheerfully knee an annoying person in the face.

Then again, Asuna was apparently married to the teenager with a daughter. Which in all likelihood opened up a whole knew can of worms. After all, for two Adventurers to adopt a daughter of the People, left the very good question of what the People in general might think of it.

Shaking the thought from his head, Shiroe continued marking down everything that'd been said during the meeting. All of the clues to their culture, all of the mentions towards how the climates of the various Floors somehow remained unchanged, all of the hints towards their relationships, all of the tiny nuggets of knowledge about how they might react to certain actions and events. He was a representative of the Round Table, and he couldn't very well leave this place without bringing some kind of report back to the rest of them.

Ignoring the politics of it all, Shiroe found himself hopelessly curious in regards to how exactly Aincrad could remain unaffected by a lessening air-pressure considering how high it reached. After all, from everything Shiroe could remember about meteorology, the entire mountain would've had to be artificially pressurized somehow, and that-...

Well, it was theoretically possible. Especially considering that Aincrad would've – at least as far as the flavor-text was concerned – been designed to fly around in the upper atmosphere amongst the clouds. But possible or not, it would've surely required massive amounts of power, and Shiroe didn't have a clue where it might be coming from.

Then again, it might be related to the same mystical force which kept Aincrad's Safety Zones working. The Safety Zones that disallowed the loss of HP, regardless of the actions taken within it.

Which actually led to a different but equally interesting question, because the Royal Guards of Akiba wasn't exactly a perfect solution, no matter how useful it was, and if they could find some way of harnessing that power outside of Aincrad-...

On her own bed next to him, Akatsuki sneezed, before making a grumbling sound and going back to snoozing away.

Shiroe wasn't entirely certain as to the reasoning behind a shared room like this, but it had its advantages. Perhaps they'd bought Akatsuki's ninja-act wholesale and concluded that she'd refuse to leave the side of her 'lord'. Or perhaps they'd made some kind of weird assumption about their relationship? Though in the case of the latter, Shiroe couldn't quite imagine why their room would've had a _second_ bed. But he didn't really want to think about that, because imagining curling up next to Akatsuki to sleep was-...

Glancing over to the ninja, Shiroe felt his eye twitch a little at how blissfully content she looked. Were their beds really that comfortable here? Or did she just always look like that when she slept?

He hadn't really thought about it much, but the only times they'd really slept next to each other had been on the road, and she was usually the one to wake him up, so he wouldn't have known even if she did.

"My lord~..." A sleepy and nearly silent moan filled their shared room.

Shiroe's pen actually snapped in his hand, and he nearly upended the ink all over himself.

Turning around to stare with wide eyes at Akatsuki's weakly shifting form as she continued to merrily sleep away the night, Shiroe wondered what exactly the ninja was dreaming about. It was probably about something like eating ice-cream, but he couldn't quite stop the niggling thought that there was a reason that her voice had sounded so... 'breathless'.

Taking a deep breath and forcefully calming himself down. Shiroe tried to pretend that he wasn't blushing to the roots of his hair, before hurriedly making sure that he hadn't ruined his report thus far. Everything was fine. But it was pretty much finished, and he kind of doubted that he'd be able to work any more on it right now. Not with how awkwardly aware he was of Akatsuki's quiet breathing.

Yes, he could do the rest in the morning when his head stopped spinning. Right now, he was going to sleep and pretend that his heart wasn't racing, and that his mind wasn't conjuring up some very unhelpful images.

He was going to bed, and he was going to sleep.

... In _his_ bed! Not in Akatsuki's! _His own_ bed!

XXX

When Asuna had told him that she'd be putting Klein in charge of convincing the Floors to cooperate to form a government, Kirito had laughed.

It hadn't even really occurred to him that his friend would – upon discovering that he'd been deceived by Asuna's pretty words of spending time with cute girls – come to Kirito to complain about it. Or rather, to _whine_ about it, seeing as how 'complaints' were more about 'fixing things' instead of 'loudly wallowing in their own misery'.

Honestly, he would've rather spent the day with Yui, teaching her the intricacies of beating boys over their heads with sticks – it was never too early to learn how important it was to scare boys away – but Asuna had needed 'family recharge'-time after all her hard work. So now he had to deal with all of the stuff that Asuna had blissfully taken a short vacation from.

Except for the Knights of the Blood, since Asuna had actually managed to grab a vice-commander to dump all of her paperwork on there. Kirito was fairly sure that it was a long-standing tradition within Asuna's guild for the 'leader' to make up reasons to avoid doing their own paperwork.

Heathcliff was apparently a good role-model.

Kirito very deliberately didn't punch Klein as the man latched onto him in a crying hug. He was saying something about how 'all the people he talked to were old and ugly' and that he had to spend so much time traveling between Floors that he couldn't even really drop by and finally eat at the recently opened pizza-place on the First Floor.

With the ease of long habit, Kirito remained blissfully unaware of the details of it all, and made all the appropriate noises to show that he was still listening. Even if he'd mostly entirely tuned Klein out after the first time he'd started to repeat himself.

Klein might be a dear friend, and Kirito might trust him with his life at the drop of a hat – even before this whole respawning-business – but that didn't mean he was going to actually pay attention to him. That'd ruin the whole dynamic of their relationship. Which included Klein mostly ranting about things that Kirito didn't care about, straight into Kirito's ear.

It was a bit weird, to realize that there was a world just outside of Aincrad's walls, after all the time that they'd spent trapped within it. But Shiroe and his ninja had taken off on a gryphon to go assist in the upcoming battle, and then that small army had shown up on a steam-boat.

It'd been a sight to see, watching all of those people moving the giant of a ship across land the way they had. It clearly hadn't been designed for the trip, what with its keel looking more like the kind of thing you'd find on an ocean-traveling ship, making their attempts to drag it across land a highly unstable-looking process. But they'd done it, and it hadn't even taken them all that long.

Which did lend some credit to their displayed levels. Sure, Aincrad and Elder Tales probably had completely different leveling-systems, so expecting someone at 'level 90' to be the same regardless of where they were from was foolish. But it was obvious that whatever the requirements for reaching those kinds of levels in Elder Tales, it didn't make them pushovers.

Honestly though, Kirito was a little bit worried about the idea of uniting Aincrad under a single banner. It needed to be done, because without it they'd be likely facing pressure from the outside to 'submit to a consistent rule', but trying to get Floors that had supposedly – according to the flavor-text anyway – been completely isolated from each other for centuries, was a bit like forcing nearly a hundred separate, and mostly isolationist, countries to flock under a single banner.

It could probably be done, especially since everyone were kind of united in their gratefulness to the SAO-players for 'clearing' their Floors. Not to mention that it certainly didn't hurt that there was some trade opening up between Floors through their recently installed cargo-lifts and the like. But it was a long-term project and Kirito wasn't sure how much time they really had.

Elder Tales had the People of the Land, and they had countries with armies of their own – even if they weren't respawning Adventurers. And Aincrad was both in a geographically important location, and filled with was likely to be exotic ingredients of various sorts – and exotic environments in which to grow them. They were a valuable target, and as long as no united government was around to 'own' those things, there was a high likelihood that the People of the Land would consider it less 'starting a war' and more 'colonizing an island'.

Not that anybody would actually let them get away with that, even if it likely meant that the Clearers mobilized to bring down any army sent their way. Aincrad was their home, the place they'd fought, bled, and died for. So, if they couldn't give the People good cause to avoid attacking, it'd be a bloodbath.

And the People of the Land didn't respawn.

Klein started bawling in the middle of his rant, having once again decided to revisit the story of that one Floor where he'd _thought_ that he'd finally get to meet a cute girl – because there'd been a cute girl involved – only to realize that he was actually meeting with her violently overprotective father.

Kirito could relate.

He would've thrown Klein out on his nose, too.

XXX

Akatsuki was restless.

Regardless of whether they hadn't known each other for very long, it was easy to see at least that much. She might have decided that Shiroe was her lord all on her own, but he would've been a pretty crappy lord if he couldn't even tell that much, when she kept fidgeting towards signaling asking him for orders.

Admittedly, had it not been for that, he knew himself well enough that he might've simply written it off as regular nervousness. But as it was, he got the distinct feeling that she was feeling very torn, and wanted him to take the decision out of her hands so that she could stop feeling torn about it.

She wasn't a support-type, and she was strong enough that she would've been an unmistakeable asset to the front-lines. But harsh as it might sound there were numerous others already available who could easily fill those positions on the battlefield.

She might've been able to help out the defenders of Choushi, seeing as they'd be the vulnerable spot in their battle-formation, but the only way she'd be able to make it there on time was by air, and the only gryphon that could've been used for that was Shiroe's own.

Shiroe was needed here to organize things, and Akatsuki had already decided against following with the Ocypete towards Choushi when it'd arrived in Aincrad. So now she was feeling superfluous, left standing guard over a lord who would not see battle, as others fought and bled for their cause.

Yes, Shiroe was very much aware that his ninja wasn't happy about her current circumstances, but there wasn't anything he could really do about it, so he ignored it. He had a battlefield to direct, and a war to win.

Everything else was-...

 _"Shiroe-san! Please help us!"_

Shiroe flinched, already on his feet and halfway out the hastily erected pavilion's door before he'd even registered what was happening. Minori was calling for help.

The girl whom he'd nearly failed once before, the girl he'd taken responsibility for, his youngest guild-member-... Minori was calling for help, a desperate plea in her voice that Shiroe hadn't heard for a long time.

Akatsuki was right behind him when he summoned the gryphon, and even though she looked worried about the sudden hurry they were in, there was a sense of relief in her face even as she panicked a little bit when he handed her the reins.

Apparently, that theoretical moment of trying to break apart the very laws of this world had come a lot sooner than he'd expected. But Minori had called for aid, and Shiroe wasn't known as an Arch Mage for nothing.

XXX

 **A/n: You have no clue how much map-checking I did in the making of this fic. I have a** _ **folder**_ **filled with maps, and several pages worth of notes on top of that. I've probably checked the canon-timeline even more, but I've been counting it in weeks instead of the days and months of LH-canon, so I think this fic's timeline ended up differing slightly from that one.**

 **But yeah, I've got** _ **pages**_ **worth of notes about a whole slew of things. And half of the time, it's just me arguing to myself about which game-logic-path makes the most sense.**

 **Also, Kirito's level at the end of the 75th Floor in canon, is 95. And he's not described as being the one with the singularly highest level. So yes, in order for the leveling-rate to make any sense at all as they continue to climb Floors, the Adventurers of Aincrad cannot be affected by the Elder Tales' level-cap of 100.**


	3. Tango for Two

XXX

Chapter 3: Tango for Two

XXX

Disclaimer: I don't own anything.

XXX

Aincrad didn't quite have a government in place yet. After nearly four weeks of Klein's diplomatic efforts, they had the People's Council which could be used to request things, but it was unwieldy and massively inefficient. So nobody was all that surprised when said almost-government couldn't quite agree on a representative for the invitation they'd received to the victory-celebration at Maihama.

The Floors didn't exactly trust other Floors, having had little to no interaction with each other for as far back as anyone could remember, which meant that they couldn't trust a representative from a different Floor than their own. And there were nearly a hundred different Floors who had the same opinion of each other's lack of trustworthiness, so a consensus was pretty much completely out of reach.

Still, that lack of trust wasn't really all that bad, considering how most deals between Floors could be settled on a Floor-to-Floor basis, and that none of them truly cared to argue all that much about the world outside of Aincrad. Apparently, having lived in almost perfect isolation for centuries of history, the Floors were quite determinedly content to rule themselves.

The only exception to this separation were the Adventurers, but everyone considered those to be something like legendary heroes, and very few Adventurers really got involved with businesses anyway. Sure, there were tailors and smiths and shopkeepers, as well as various other odds and ends, but despite their job-titles they either worked almost exclusively with high-level customers or they were pretty laid back about running a store.

In other words, in the eyes of the People of Aincrad, there weren't a lot of competition to be wary of from the Adventurers' side of things, so most everyone were quite content with having said Adventurers represent them internationally, as long as they didn't try to make any explicit business-deals and instead brought back any offers to the council as a whole.

Considering how utterly unenthusiastic the Adventurers in question had been at the idea of talking merchant-stuff, Kirito honestly couldn't say that it'd been a stupid move. An exasperating one perhaps, since it meant that some poor sod would need to write up any offer made to them to bring it back to the full council, but not a bad decision.

'If you can't trust someone with your back, don't give them a chance to stab you in it.' That was just common sense.

But that also meant that their group of potential diplomats were entirely down to Adventurers, which was a bit awkward. Not to mention that Adventurers had their own politics to bicker about.

They needed to send someone strong, so at least one Clearer was a must. They needed to send someone well-connected, so probably a guild-leader. They needed to send someone who could be trusted, so someone well-respected.

Kirito had gleefully let everyone else worry about the details, seeing as his own reputation kept him away from both 'well-connected' and 'well-respected', making him very close to illegible. So it'd come as a complete surprise to him when Asuna had guiltily admitted that their whole little family was going on vacation.

Yui seemed enthusiastic enough about visiting a foreign land filled with potential hostiles, but Kirito had really been planning on slacking off now that their push onto the 93rd Floor was over.

Apparently, seeing as how Kirito was 'the strongest player', Asuna was the guild-leader of 'the strongest Clearer guild', and their daughter was 'one of the People of Aincrad', everyone had thrown the three of them under the buss. It might've also had something to do with the fact that Klein's attempts at diplomacy were now legendarily infamous, and that most everyone agreed that the DDA were dicks.

Not that anyone would ever say that out loud where they could hear it, of course. But that didn't change the facts.

Obviously, there were some complications with having the leader of the DDA's 'rival guild' somewhere away from Aincrad, but considering how pissy the People's Council would be if they did something wrong-... Well, if the DDA made a nuisance of themselves in Asuna's absence, then they'd end up in charge of trying to wrangle the council into some kind of diplomatic agreement, and that'd keep them occupied for _months_ at least. Not to mention how extremely uncomfortable it'd be for everyone involved.

The DDA would be lucky to even survive that, when its members realized that they could just quit the guild and join one that _wasn't_ slowly being choked to death under the mounds of petty paperwork that the council refused to stop generating.

Ah, the wonders of bureaucracy. And the beauty of being able to use it to threaten annoying people into not causing problems for everyone around them. Kirito couldn't quite suppress the evil grin at the thought.

But even if it'd been decided that they'd be the diplomats, they still needed an escort. An escort that wasn't Klein, because yes, he was _that_ infamous by now. The realization that they'd be perfectly willing to send _Kirito the Beater_ on a diplomatic mission, whilst keeping Klein away from it, kind of went to show how ridiculously infamous the man had become. And that was despite how Klein had actually done exactly what he'd been sent out to achieve, which had been to create the People's Council.

It was probably the fact that he kept getting tossed down elevator shafts into Safe Zones by overprotective fathers. It was kind of really hard not to notice, seeing as how he tended to scream like a little girl, all the way down. Not that Kirito could entirely blame him for that, because falling from a ridiculously high place to your non-death was still going to give you nightmares, even if it didn't actually hurt you. But that was neither here nor there.

It wasn't like they could really send anyone who wanted to go, and they were somewhat limited to people who were either politically important or capable of running for the hills without getting caught – just in case things went unimaginably bad. Which meant that there were a total of four citizens of Aincrad hitching a ride on the Ocypete as it returned to Maihama. A Family of three, and a certain information-broker who was notoriously good at her job.

There would've been five of them, but Agil had decided that he was going to be catching up on his regularly scheduled nap-time, instead of sitting around a table and glaring at stuffy people for possibly hours on end. And there wasn't really anything Kirito could use to argue against that.

Nap-time was the most important part of the day.

XXX

It was hard to make an accurate assessment of the four diplomats from Aincrad, but they seemed like good people.

It was a bit strange that there were only four of them, until Shiroe remembered that this wasn't really a celebration for Aincrad so much as it was a chance for Aincrad to join in with some polite applause for the victory of their neighbors. There was a 'quality over quantity'-feel to the group, that made Shiroe quite certain that it'd been chosen for its ability to leg it should the negotiations turn ugly, and Shiroe couldn't quite help but wonder what exactly they were expecting to face at Maihama.

Still, there were definitely some oddities in their chosen diplomats that made Shiroe itch to figure it out.

He'd met Asuna before, of course. What with her seemingly being the main spokesperson during the information-exchange that had been negotiating the Ocypete's journey past Aincrad. It did make him wonder whether or not she was the most respected guild-leader available, or if she'd taken on the role as their face outwards for a different reason.

Kirito was a bit more complex, seeing as he was the young woman's husband, and one of the Adventurers with the highest levels that Shiroe had managed to catch a glimpse of during his entire time in Aincrad. Definitely a strong player, but the question was if the teenager was respected for it or not. His reason for attending seemed somewhat flimsy.

Then there was Yui, whose reason for attending was _blatantly_ flimsy – especially considering how the group seemed to be prepared for hostilities – and which had been officially summed up with the words 'we couldn't find a sitter'. Meaning that either they were making up excuses, or that they were for some reason overly cautious about letting the young girl out of their sight.

If Asuna was really the leader of one of the most important guilds in Aincrad, then she should've been able to trust someone in said guild to take care of the girl. The fact that she was claiming that she couldn't meant that she likely didn't actually trust her guild-members all that much. Which wasn't actually all that implausible, considering how the Knights of the Blood had somewhere around thirty members, and it was entirely possible that the recruiting hadn't been as selective as it could've been. There were bound to be some unsavory characters capable of slipping through the cracks, though that she couldn't find _anyone_ trustworthy among those thirty people set off more than a few warning-bells in Shiroe's ears.

It was possible that she'd only recently been promoted to guild-leader, inheriting an unstable position from the previous one. But a guild was built on trust, and if the guild-leader didn't trust the members, then the guild wouldn't last for very long. So if Asuna truly didn't trust the Knights of the Blood with anything important, then it was very likely that the guild was going to start breaking apart within a few more months, depending on what exactly they were doing over there.

To be honest, the presence of the family of three really unnerved Shiroe for some reason. Perhaps it was merely the resurfacing worry of nepotism and delusions of grandeur having taken over Aincrad's leadership, or perhaps it was simply that Shiroe had never been all that good with children. Either way, it made him uncomfortable.

The fourth and final member of Aincrad's expedition was someone Shiroe hadn't even caught a glimpse of previously. Another young woman, this one with whisker-marks drawn on her face. Argo was apparently an information-broker famously nicknamed 'the Rat', and seemed to be infinitely amused by toying with people's heads. She also seemed to be a good friend of Kirito's, considering how they teased each other.

That an information-broker would want to attend this kind of gathering was perfectly reasonable, and if she was as famous as she proclaimed herself to be then she likely had enough respect to leverage out an invitation to come along. That wasn't a concern, Shiroe would've been more worried if Aincrad _hadn't_ sent someone whose job clearly included the gathering of information – mostly because in that case he would've been worried about which member was their secretly appointed information-gatherer.

What did concern Shiroe however, was that – even aside from the family of three – the four members all had a clear informal connection to each other. After all, Yui seemed to be fond enough of the woman to have taken to calling her 'auntie'.

It was possible that the friendship had been established amongst people who were simply 'the best'. But it was equally possible that the friendship had somehow allowed Argo to muscle into the position of 'the best information-broker'.

And Shiroe still wanted to know how the hell Aincrad's government worked, as well as get an actual explanation for what 'Clearers' really were.

Oh, certainly, Clearers were people who'd risked their lives, trying to free everyone from the game. But that didn't account for the culture that would've likely sprung up around them during their two years of imprisonment. Where they considered as something like nobles, or police-officers, or military, or just heroes? How did the non-Clearers treat them, and how far did they trust in their judgment?

The fact that – barring the underage Yui – no member of the People were to be part of the upcoming diplomatic gathering was also telling. Though what exactly it was telling _of_ was up for grabs. Did the People simply have nobody available who was willing to venture outside of Aincrad? Did the potential opinions of the People actually not factor in at all with the Adventurers of Aincrad? Did the People simply trust that the Adventurers would be enough to secure whatever interests they had in this meeting? Or was Shiroe missing something again?

It was frustrating to have to deal with so many unanswered questions dangling just outside of his reach.

Still, he couldn't quite reject his initial impression that the four who'd been sent to attend the big celebration at Maihama were good people.

XXX

Either Argo had hit her head somewhere, or there really was such a thing as 'love at first sight'. Kirito wasn't sure which option disturbed him the most.

One moment everyone had been politely following the lead of their hosts, dancing or juggling politics, the next Argo had decided to make a spectacle of herself. Which was absurd, because Argo didn't _do_ that. She clung to her 'behind the scenes' persona at all times, and only really let her more playful side make an appearance among people she trusted.

That was probably part of why she was such an amazing information-broker. Everyone could appreciate professionalism when lives were on the line.

Asuna had been caught up smiling with chilly politeness at all of the stuffy old men who seemed convinced that it ought to have been Kirito doing the politicking, because apparently it wasn't a woman's place to lead a country. So Kirito had played with Yui and pretended to have absolutely nothing between his ears except for air and hopeless adoration for his cute daughter. It wasn't exactly difficult, but it also meant that he had to pretend not to be paying attention to Asuna's frosty temper or be caught cataloging the good escape-routes.

There was a reason there were only four of them present, and it could be roughly summed up as 'the less people there are, the easier they are to evacuate'. Functional immortality or not, nobody wanted to die, and since Yui had come with them, Kirito wouldn't hesitate to do everything in his power to get her clear and back to safety, no matter the cost.

Though he was grateful that – unlike most of the People who could've otherwise been chosen – Yui was small enough to carry under his arm if he had to leap out through a window or something.

He'd been distantly aware that Argo had seemingly hit it off with the cat-person 'Nyanta' from Akiba, but it'd seemed to be more along the lines of investigating what it was like to be a non-human type of character. There was also a younger girl involved in that talk, and Kirito had guessed that Argo would collect the information she wanted and then disappear off to collect even more information about something else. Except she hadn't.

For some bizarre reason, Argo had taken offense to their hosts inability to 'play anything other than waltz', which had somehow led to her grabbing Nyanta and asking one of the other Adventurer bards if they knew how to play tango.

Which was absurd, because Argo didn't _do_ stuff like that, except she had, and now she'd cleared the dance-floor as the People of the Land stared a little awestruck at the two of them. Kirito also noted that the girl Nyanta had been talking to looked kind of utterly heartbroken, but hopefully that would sort itself out.

Obnoxious though she could be, being the center of attention hadn't ever seemed like a thing that Argo enjoyed, though Kirito could admit that it was possible that she'd calmed down about it now that their lives weren't really on the line. They were functionally immortal after all, and it was kind of comforting to know.

But still, tango? Argo doing the tango with someone she'd just met? Argo doing the tango amidst stuffy politicians who only wanted to do the waltz?

'Head-trauma' was the theory that made the most sense in Kirito's eyes, but everyone kept insisting that love was blind, so maybe that was related?

XXX

Smooth movement, morphing into sharp movement. Rapid flows, suddenly becoming agonizingly slow. Hands that never stopped moving, as if they couldn't quite decide which parts they wanted to touch the most. Faces so close together that Nyanta's whiskers would brush her cheeks every time they turned.

Tango was very much a sensual type of dance.

The orchestra seemed more or less stunned by both the music and the dancing, and they weren't alone in that. It made Shiroe wonder whether or not he'd actually heard any kind of music that weren't from Elder Tales, because if people were awestruck by the _music_ whilst Nyanta and the woman from Aincrad danced tango like it was going out of style, then perhaps there was something to it that was worth paying attention to.

It was entirely possible that the People weren't so much _not_ utterly scandalized by the dance, as that they were too awestruck by the idea of a different kind of music to really notice that they ought to be scandalized. Or perhaps they weren't as prudishly stuffy as Shiroe had been led to believe by the rest of their observed culture.

The People of the Land followed a lot of the norms of old Europe, and that place had considered waltz to be a daring and nearly scandalous kind of dance when it'd first appeared. After all, in waltz the dance-partners were supposed to actually _touch_ each other, rather than sort of awkwardly hover next to each other.

Shiroe made a face as his eyes fell on an expression that was very different from the rest.

Poor Serara looked devastated, but that was kind of expected considering how some strange woman had swooped in out of nowhere and stolen her crush off to dance the most intimately sensual dance in the known world. Heartbreak was perfectly understandable, considering the situation.

But from what Shiroe could see from this distance, Nyanta was mostly concentrating on the movements of the dance rather than his dance-partner. More sensual because the dance was designed to be a contest of sensuality, than sensual because there was someone worth being sensual with. The professional pride of a dancer was a fearsome thing.

Akatsuki fidgeted next to him, and Shiroe decided that he should probably save them both the humiliation of trying to do the tango by asking the ninja for a dance the moment a waltz started up again. And that wasn't entirely because the idea of Akatsuki leaning heavily into his arms and the both of them letting their hands wander-...

Well, it wasn't entirely because the thought of... _that_ made him kind of want to run away and hide under his bed for a week or two. It was also because he was fairly certain that he'd have a very hard time not dragging Akatsuki along _with him_ , and then entirely skipping the idea of hiding _under_ the bed.

And he really didn't need the reminder about what 'horizontal tango' meant, thank you very much.

XXX

"Oho? Did you like the show, Kii-bou?" Argo grinned at him.

Kirito made a thoughtful noise before nodding. "I've never really watched people dance before, so it was interesting. I never considered how the footwork involved in that might effect someone's ability to fight."

Argo's grinning face kind of stuttered and her shoulders slumped. "Ah, you're the same as always, Kii-bou." She glanced towards Asuna, and made a weird motion with her hand. "You have my deepest sympathies, Aa-chan."

Asuna smiled, looking fondly amused for some reason. "I don't know. _I_ think it's adorable."

Kirito had the strangest feeling that he was being made fun of.

XXX

Shiroe sighed. It'd been three weeks since the ball at Maihama, and everyone were being very demanding of his time.

Maryelle wanted him to help plan for the upcoming Autumn Festival, because that woman loved her celebrations. Akiba as a whole still needed a few problems smoothed out in its running. And Isuzu wanted to build a school.

Log Horizon's newest member was very passionate about music, and had taken great offense when it'd been revealed that the People of the Land only had forty-two songs. Within the first week of the end of the Ball, she'd already organized a huge meeting between music-interested individuals so that they could all try and write down as many songs from their old world as they could find.

However, simply adding more songs to the number of 'forty-two' wasn't actually going to fix the main issue. Namely, how the People were unable to make their own music.

Which was why Isuzu wanted to build a school, open for musicians all across Yamato. A place where they could learn how to compose, as well as a place to meet others who were doing the same thing. Whether the school survived for very long, before its students spread across the world and created their own ways of teaching the musicians of Yamato, wasn't really a concern. Isuzu was convinced that the People needed a starting-place, and she was determined to give it to them.

All things considered, Isuzu was probably the one who was causing Shiroe the least amount of annoyances of the three main things that occupied his time. She had somehow managed to charm a good dozen other Adventurers into helping her out, and really didn't need much more than a bit of funds from the Round Table to pay a salary to her teachers.

It was kind of crazy that Isuzu – who couldn't be older than seventeen – had ended up as the headmistress of an entire school, when she herself ought to still have been stuck as a student in one back in their old world. But all the other teachers seemed quite enthusiastic about following her lead, so Shiroe wasn't going to question it.

More amusing though was Isuzu's decided name for said school. And Shiroe had been very clear that nobody was ever going to explain what a 'golden retriever' actually was to Rudy. Mostly because it was funny.

The mage knew that Isuzu had named the school after him to some extent – in honor of it having been him who inadvertently gave her the idea – but he didn't quite understand it. 'The Golden Retriever's Institute of Music and Dance', or 'the Golden Retriever' for short, translated into something like 'the golden fetcher' for the People of the Land. And considering how Rudy was blond and Isuzu had made him run errands here and there from time to time, it sounded more like a slightly-rude nickname to Rudy and everyone else relying on the auto-translate feature than what it actually was.

Shiroe dearly hoped that he'd be able to see Rudy's face the moment he realized that Isuzu usually looked at him in the light of dealing with a pet dog. It was bound to be hilarious.

XXX

Lord Marves had tried to grab Yui.

Lord Marves lost an arm.

Lord Marves' bodyguards tried to step in.

Lord Marves' bodyguards woke up in their cathedral back in Minami.

Lord Marves said a lot of things about being important, and desperately talked a lot about his many elaborate plans for Akiba.

Lord Marves was sent back to his ship – sans an arm – along with the very politely worded note that, should they ever desire to make trade through Aincrad again, then the Holy Empire Westelande were to offer an official apology for having one of its nobles openly assaulting the princess of Aincrad.

Kirito stared after the ship as it disappeared over the horizon. On the one hand, he was fairly sure that a great deal of offense would be had against them for their violent actions. On the other hand, the Adventurers of Minami hadn't been expecting Aincrad to be populated with SAO-survivors, and had looked partially terrified at the thought of somehow pissing them off even before the actual fighting had begun.

All in all, from the performance of the bodyguards, Kirito was fairly sure that Aincrad could weather most enemy forces that could be thrown at them without much issue. And he was pretty sure that the Holy Empire Westelande would be trying to make amends for Lord Marves' behavior, rather than using it as a reason to march to war.

Then again, honestly he didn't care all that much. Neither did any of the other Clearers. Even the DDA loved Yui, and they were dicks.

The idea of some bigoted old man would dare raise his hand towards Yui had been enough for the girl to be officially declared to be 'royalty until further notice'. Which meant that – as Yui's parents – Asuna and Kirito would probably end up with an official royalty-status soon enough.

Not that any of that particularly mattered. No, much more important was the very serious consideration of what to do with Lord Marves' severed arm.

Kirito was seriously considering mounting it on a pike down by the harbor, but Asuna kept insisting that that was unhygienic, and Thinker had suggested a 'burning of the arm'-festival.

It was a choice that weighed heavily on Kirito's mind, as he absently listened to Klein try to cheer Yui up by giving her as much ice-cream as she could eat.

But really, what kind of idiot tries to separate a parent from their child over something as idiotic as them 'being of the People'?

XXX

Shiroe took a deep breath, and then read through the letter again.

Aincrad, being as it was situated in the middle of what used to have been a channel rather than a few kilometers separating the 'Tokyo Lake' from the sea, was the port that every ship needed to pass through in order to reach Maihama. Which meant that Lord Marves' plans of causing problems for Akiba had fallen apart when he hadn't been able to continue past said port.

The plans had been clever, and Shiroe had still had to deal with some of it through the annoying pattern-less improvisations from Lord Marves' subjects. But in the end it'd been impossible for the man to follow through, seeing as he'd managed to provoke the Adventurers of Aincrad into sending him back to his country sans an arm.

Aincrad, who had in fact gone so far as to officially name 'Yui of the People of Aincrad' as their princess in retaliation to the man's actions. It was rather blatantly obvious to Shiroe that it'd been a spur-of-the-moment kind of thing, but it was probably the most efficient way of keeping Westelande from demanding that those who'd defended the girl be punished.

In all likelihood, the girl was simply very popular among the Adventurers and the People both, and they'd all been more than happy to take revenge against the man who'd tried to grab her. Though Shiroe was wondering if it was because the girl's parents were well-respected, or if it was something about what she represented to the Adventurers.

Two years they'd been trapped within SAO, separated from their families. So it wasn't all that farfetched to imagine that the idea of Asuna and Kirito being Yui's parents was something a bit like 'proof that family can be found' for the Adventurers. And in that case, them closing ranks to defend the 'ideal happy family' that they so longed for, could be fairly easily explained.

Not that the Adventurers of Aincrad were alone in closing ranks. In fact, the People's Council seemed to have finally found something they could agree on, and had been quite gleefully inventing long-standing traditions about how 'princess were chosen to live with Adventurers'. Never shying away from saying that Westelande must be quite the barbaric place indeed that its nobles would attempt to interfere in such a thing.

Lord Marves and his heavy-handed attempt to 'return the child stolen from the People' had caused a lot of problems for a lot of people, even as it united all of Aincrad towards a common enemy.

In fact, according to the letter, there were plans regarding holding an entire festival around the burning of the man's severed arm. And Shiroe honestly wasn't sure if he was supposed to laugh or wince at that, morbid as it was.

Two years trapped in a death-game, always knowing that they could be killed by their bodies failing, their avatars dying, or the government pulling the plug on them. To have kept on going in the face of that, the SAO-victims were a determined bunch.

And, the more he saw of them, the more he was realizing that, whether they be the People of Aincrad who'd survived in isolation on their separated Floors for centuries, or the Adventurers of Aincrad who'd risked their lives to connect those Floors; the citizens of Aincrad as a whole were a ruthlessly capable people.

Shiroe was finding it hard to decide whether he ought to be impressed or terrified by the people who'd always been referred to by the media as the innocent 'victims' of the SAO-Incident. The more he looked at it, the more he'd call them 'survivors' instead.

Regardless, with Aincrad's geographical position in mind, this particular series of events could lead to the international trade in Maihama being dealt an almost crippling blow. After all, most of Maihama's trade came by sea-route, and if Aincrad refused to let Westelande's ships pass through their ports, then the trade between the two countries could potentially be brought to a complete halt, depending on exactly how reliant they truly were on the sea-routes.

And if trade fell through, then war would likely become more and more attractive as tensions rose. But considering the way that a handful of Aincrad's Adventurers had wiped out nearly fifty high-level Adventurers within a few minutes-...

Nobody wanted to end up declaring war on an unpredictable party who could very well be capable of crushing their armies underneath their heel. And who knew how a party as unpredictable as Aincrad would take an open declaration of war between Eastal and Westelande? No, most likely all plans surrounding war were going to be carefully revised until the People of the Land managed to at least convince themselves that Aincrad wasn't as dangerous as they'd feared them to be.

Shiroe knew that the Adventurers of Elder Tales vastly outnumbered the Adventurers of Aincrad, and he knew that there was likely a lot of trauma involved in fighting other humans that the SAO-survivors had that the rest of the world didn't have. But in all likelihood that just meant that Aincrad wouldn't treat a declaration of war as a game.

And if war wasn't a game-... Well, the saying went that 'all is fair in love and war'.

It was hard to imagine how Aincrad might be able to turn a war against Adventurers into a 'true war' instead of a massive PVP-event, but Adventurers spawned in specific locations. And now that the game-mechanics allowed for it, locations could be destroyed, couldn't they?

Shiroe really didn't want to imagine what would happen, should someone actually manage to permanently destroy a cathedral, but he could guess that if someone really pushed them, Aincrad was probably the party most likely to attempt to do it.

XXX

Kirito breathed a sigh of relief when he first heard Westelande offer an unconditional apology for the actions of one of their nobles, almost a week after the incident in question.

Nobody wanted to end up in a war with their surroundings, but they couldn't exactly let them get away with doing something like this without surrendering too much of their independence. It was a politic-thing, and Kirito wasn't entirely happy about trying to figure it out.

Asuna was much better at dealing with people than he was, and even she seemed mostly resigned to the annoyance that was juggling empty platitudes with the countries around them. But then, his wife had always had a tendency towards stabbing things first and asking questions later.

It was part of why he loved her.

Still, dodging out of a potential war-declaration was cause for celebration, even if the arm-burning festival had perhaps been a little bit too much on the enemy-provocation scale than what had probably been sensible. In hindsight.

Yui seemed to have had a lot of fun with it though, so Kirito really wasn't regretting it at all.

Their daughter was officially a princess of the People of Aincrad, and they'd just reached the 97th Floor. Tensions were high, and excitement was building, because even if there was nothing up there, the Clearers had been trying to reach the 100th Floor for so long that they couldn't quite stop themselves from vibrating in curious excitement.

Of course, there were those who seemed more somber about it, in all likelihood thinking deeply about how they were supposed to distract themselves from being trapped when they no longer had the goal of Clearing the Floors. After all, what was a Clearer without any further Floors to fight their way through?

Hopefully, they'd find an answer once they actually reached that place, because right now they didn't really have a clue.

XXX

The Round Table was hemorrhaging money.

Not in the sense of 'they needed to stop buying frivolous things', but more along the lines of 'they had a national debt'. It wasn't due to anything the Adventurers had done, so much as it had to do with the game-mechanics of it all.

In-game, a certain amount of money was taken away on a timely basis depending on the size and cost of the purchased building. It was supposed to reflect the 'cost of upkeep', and was rarely especially extravagant, seeing as land tended to be fairly inexpensive for a player to buy. But that wasn't the case anymore.

The Round Table owned the Cathedral, the Guild Building, and the Trade Building, along with several other similarly important facilities. And the prices for those places were ludicrously high, meaning that the calculated upkeep from the game-mechanics were equally ridiculous. The money in question wasn't even actually used for upkeep purposes, seeing as they needed to hire people separately in order to actually perform maintenance on them.

It was just a whole lot of money, going down the drain.

It wasn't sustainable, and yet they couldn't give up on any of the buildings for fear that a single guild or person would be able to cough up enough money to take it for themselves and create an imbalance in power.

So of course he'd talked to the Kunie who were in charge of money, but apparently they were severely limited in their ability to help. Not even when Shiroe had bypassed the concept of 'loan' and instead suggested the idea of 'selling certain things to be permanently held by the Yamato-server'.

Apparently, it wasn't that they were unsympathetic, but rather that – due to an ancient treaty – they didn't have any authority over the gold that they held. They couldn't make or oversee a contract like that, because it would be to 'interfere with the flow of the gold', which they were forbidden from doing.

Considering the Kunie Clan's very specific lack of a denial though, Shiroe was pretty sure he understood how to bypass that particular constraint. The Kunie Clan couldn't interfere, but the way they used the ancient treaty to refuse meant that their inability to interfere was purely due to that.

So all he needed to do was find some way to commandeer the Kunie's technical ability to manipulate the flow of gold. And ReGan just so happened to have a big clue about where they might find a way to do that.

Which was why he'd grabbed Naotsugu and were now halfway to Susukino.

He probably should deal with Aincrad, or with the princess, or with Akatsuki's discomfort at being left behind, but-...

He was mostly leaving Akatsuki behind because he trusted her, and because the ninja was in desperate need of friends. And... because he might be getting a little bit worried with how used he'd started to become to having a second pair of hands following him around. It was useful to be sure, but he'd actually started to not pick certain things up when moving out the door, because he'd been entirely convinced that Akatsuki would be there to pick them up for him.

He hadn't actually been _wrong_ , most of the time. But it was such a habit of casual reliance that he felt a bit like he was exploiting her for manual labor.

Regardless, the money-problem of the Round Table was a priority, and Akatsuki was uniquely suited to befriend the princess, among the people Shiroe actually trusted to be capable of guarding her. As for Aincrad-... Well, they seemed to have calmed down a lot, now that nobody dared to go out of their way to provoke them, and the sea-trade was once again flowing smoothly through the mountain-kingdom's ports.

XXX

"Welcome." A familiar voice echoed across the room.

They'd finally defeated the Floor Boss of the 99th Floor, nearly a month after the incident with Lord Marves, with everyone working harder than ever in order to reach their final goal. December was just around the corner, and they'd hurried past the stairs to begin the final climb, only to belatedly realize that the 100th Floor was a giant Boss Room.

Heathcliff smiled at them from the throne that dominated the empty room. Like a proud parent, now amused by their bewilderment. "It's been a while."

Kirito wasn't sure who realized it first, but it was Asuna who answered.

"Kayaba." It was more stunned horror and heartbroken betrayal, than anger. She'd always admired her former guild-leader, even if he sometimes annoyed her by skipping out on doing his paperwork.

Heathcliff's smile grew a bit warmer, as if he was honestly happy to see her. "Ah, I hear motherhood is treating you well, Asuna-kun."

Kirito saw red.

XXX

 **A/n: What? Did you really think I'd killed him off that easily?**

 **And yeah, Argo does tango, because reasons. Vathara is again to blame for Nyanta being a professional dancer.**


	4. The 100th Floor

XXX

Chapter 4: The 100th Floor

XXX

Disclaimer: I don't own anything.

XXX

It was peaceful. Like it always was in those brief moments before a memory faded in return for a life. But with time, even that tranquility had to pass.

Kirito opened his eyes to the ceiling of the cathedral on the 99th Floor. He could hear people yelling, cursing, crying.

He felt numb.

Heathcliff the Paladin. That was the name of the Final Boss of Aincrad. He was a Boss with the intelligence and tactics of a human, and with the ability to summon monsters powerful enough to be Floor Bosses on their own to aid him in battle.

They hadn't stood a chance, still reeling from the implications of Heathcliff's identity and the betrayal within that, they'd been annihilated to the last with seemingly no effort at all. With the two summoned Floor Bosses keeping the man from being swarmed, they hadn't even been able to scratch him.

It was a complete defeat. And it was a reminder that Kayaba Akihiko didn't play fair.

Kirito glanced over at Asuna who sat slumped a bit away from him. The other Knights of the Blood weren't fairing much better, Kirito observed. Most of them had admired Heathcliff and his natural charisma, so to them this had been personal.

It'd felt personal to him, and all he'd had to go with was Asuna's admiration for a man thought dead for six months. Her predecessor as guild-leader, her mentor in battle-strategy, one of the best leaders the front-line of SAO had ever had.

The man who dumped his paperwork on her, the man who praised both her abilities and her charisma, the man who accepted her resignation from their guild with the air of understanding. Who had glanced at Kirito and not bothered with telling him to keep her happy, because he wasn't dumb enough to not see that he already would.

Brief moments that had suddenly twisted into something entirely different. A parental smile that looked so insufferably smug in his certainty that they would be among those coming for him. A man who'd spy on their happy moments as a family, who'd applaud their ability as parents, whilst in the same breath casually admitting to being the monster who'd trapped them all inside of his Death Game.

Yes, Kirito could understand why that might be taken personally by the Knights of the Blood, even if he couldn't quite remember what it felt like to be outraged at the moment. He felt a bit too... hollow inside for that.

Some of the yelling was starting to be aimed their way, Kirito noted absently, not really listening to what was being said. But some of the members of the KoB were flinching, curling in on themselves as if they were somehow guilty merely for their association with Heathcliff's betrayal.

Asuna twitched a little.

Kirito was wondering if this meant that he'd lost the title of 'the strongest player' since Heathcliff had defeated him before and was actually still alive. Or, did Kayaba not count, seeing as he was more a Floor Boss than a player? Actually, had Heathcliff cheated in their duel? Kirito was pretty sure that the man hadn't been supposed to be able to move that quickly, but maybe that had just been his imagination?

Oh, and the sword that Lisbeth had made for him had broken. Which was a shame. He'd either have to get a new one or go looking for a different drop. Being a dual-wielder sure was a hassle.

The yelling was definitely aimed their way now, people were shouting and cursing at them. Which probably meant that they believed that they needed a proper scapegoat, and that they'd chosen the Knights of the Blood for it. Kirito wasn't sure if he was included in that or not, but he _had_ married the current guild-leader so he was assuming that to be the case.

It wasn't like being infamous wasn't normal by now, anyway.

"Shut up!" Asuna's voice pierced through the general shouting, causing everyone to take a step back.

Kirito saw tear-tracks on her face, which was a little bit annoying, because he couldn't quite remember how he was supposed to deal with Asuna crying. He thought that it might have something to do with hugging, but he got the feeling that she'd stab anything that touched her right now, so he wasn't sure if that would've been a good idea.

Asuna climbed to her feet, glaring. "Knights of the Blood. Our founder has betrayed us." Her voice echoed between the walls of the cathedral in the sudden silence. "He's-..." She gritted her teeth. "Do you really think that we're going to let a blot on our good name survive?!"

Kirito tilted his head, and realized that there was something like hope in the eyes of the KoB-members.

Asuna's glare swept across everyone gathered. "Heathcliff... is ours to kill."

A few mouths opened in protest, but Kirito simply nodded. The Knights of the Blood should of course be given the chance to avenge this slight against them. They deserved at least that much.

"Knights of the Blood, on your feet!" Asuna's voice resounded across the hall.

Kirito blinked as he suddenly found himself standing shoulder-to-shoulder with the KoB-members, not entirely sure why his body had reacted like that. He'd resigned from the guild before the Transition to this world, and he'd never really rejoined it, preferring his own black outfit instead of the white and red of the KoB.

But she'd called for him to stand, so he'd stood.

He was pretty sure that Asuna was going to force them to do a lot of teamwork stuff and even more level-grinding, before she aimed them at Heathcliff once more.

He wasn't wrong.

XXX

Shiroe was used to raids that could take weeks to clear. He supposed that he was very lucky that his body in this world was as used to camping in raid-dungeons as his old one had been to camping in front of the computer, but his mind had long since grown used to the hectic and dull mess of it all.

No, the raid wasn't a problem. Even if it was definitely a challenging raid to participate in. If anything, that just made it more enjoyable.

But there were problems.

Shiroe and Demiqas didn't exactly get along, even with the Silver Sword around to act as a buffer, and with a raid-dungeon for a distraction. That was potentially a problem, depending on if their dislike for each other made an appearance at an inopportune time, but it wasn't much of one.

Naotsugu talking to Maryelle every evening about pointless things was really only a reminder that Shiroe's old friend had apparently entered the semi-obnoxious state of his relationship with the guild-leader. And if Naotsugu and Maryelle started to end their calls with 'love you more'-marathons, Shiroe would not be held accountable for his actions.

The Silver Sword being made up out of relative unknowns as far as Shiroe's strategies were concerned was also a problem, but it was again a fairly minor one. He knew enough to know how to implement his plans, and they knew his thought-process well enough to listen to him when he shouted orders that William hadn't given. There really wasn't a need for anything more than that.

No, to Shiroe, the main problem was the fact that nobody stifled a laugh when he made an insulting hand-signal, nobody sat down across from him when he was working in order to glare at him until he remembered to eat, nobody shared his enthusiasm for curry – though they hadn't really had much in the way of decent food since arriving either – and nobody was falling asleep on the couch next to him and making distractingly breathless noises.

Shiroe was a loner by nature. It wasn't necessarily that he disliked others, so much as that he found it easier to simply rely on himself and not have to think about the people around him. He was used to it, and he was content with it. Mostly, anyway.

He'd made friends with the members of the Debauchery Tea Party, and he'd picked up a few friendly acquaintances as he'd gone about his life, but in the end he was a loner.

Which was probably why he'd been so utterly blindsided by the realization that he missed Akatsuki.

It wasn't that she was talented in combat. She was, but she hadn't really had any experience with full raids, so including her in this one would've been almost entirely a learning experience for her. She might have excelled at it, she might not have, but the Silver Sword already had experienced participants and it would've been tough for her to compete with them.

It wasn't that she kept him from forgetting important things, though she definitely did do that. Naotsugu didn't seem overly surprised to have to drag Shiroe away from his work when his body needed a break, and the Guardian was fairly good at it too.

It wasn't even that she smiled at his silently signed jokes, or that she grabbed his bag when he inevitably forgot to grab it himself. He just missed her.

He missed having someone pull with hesitant gentleness at his shirt in order to catch his attention. He missed having Akatsuki deliberately go out of her way to bother him with 'my lord'. He missed the way she squeaked when someone snuck up on her. He missed the way she'd threaten him with wrinkles for frowning all the time. He missed-...

He missed her. Really badly.

In fact, he missed her so badly that he'd found himself honestly considering taking a page out of Naotsugu's book and calling her up to talk about utterly pointless things. Except, he couldn't actually do that.

Shiroe wasn't really very good at small-talk, so it'd end up being a 'what funny thing has happened up here', which might've sounded like a decent subject until one realized that it could easily be interpreted as 'we have lots of fun up here without you'. And he knew his stubbornly loyal ninja well enough that she'd instantly launch herself head-first into the most pessimistic conclusion she could find.

He couldn't talk about fun things that he was doing, because it felt like he was laughing at her for not being there to experience them with him. And Akatsuki was probably worse at small-talk than he was, so it wasn't like he could just listen to what _she_ was doing.

No, the only contact he had with Akatsuki was during her reports on the 'mission' he'd assigned to her. And he was kind of both really glad and really disappointed that those calls weren't video-capable.

He missed seeing her face, but considering that he'd caught himself signing weird approximations of 'miss you' in a language that didn't actually _have_ those words-... Well, it would've been really embarrassing if she'd actually seen that.

XXX

Kirito wasn't entirely sure how truthful Heathcliff had been during that fight, but he was still oddly compelled to believe the man.

The Safe Zones of Aincrad was a magic that didn't exist in the world of Elder Tales. So how did they work? Obviously it wasn't the same ambient magical circles that protected the cities of Elder Tales, but there had to be _something_ that was being sacrificed, just as Adventurers gave up some of their memories in order to return to life.

According to Heathcliff, it was powered by death. Not in the sense of human sacrifice, but more in the sense of damming up a river in order to power electrical turbines. When the People died of natural causes, the energy expelled from 'everything that they was' passed through the magical equivalent of those turbines. And those turbines in turn powered the magic inherent in Aincrad.

That much Kirito was nearly entirely convinced was true, though in all likelihood massively simplified for the sake of their comprehension. The question was whether or not Heathcliff had lied about the rest of it.

An Adventurer could tie themselves into that flow, and die permanently.

Kirito was fairly sure that Heathcliff believed it, though he was probably not entirely sure if he'd die properly or just kind of get 'used up' entirely by actually entrapping his entire being into the system, rather than simply passing it through like the People were designed to do.

Either way, it really only mattered in the sense of Adventurers wanting to die rather than survive in this world without death. Or possibly to the citizens of Aincrad when presented with the possibility of the gigantic mountain-kingdom running out of energy. Not that the latter one should be of any true concern.

Heathcliff mused that – even with teleportation up and running at ten times the rate it'd been during SAO – it would still take them centuries to deplete the current reserves of magic, and that was if they managed to somehow stop any new energy from being added to the system. As it was, if anything, it ought to be gaining noticeably more energy as time passed rather than losing it. Especially since Aincrad was no longer capable of flying in the sky.

Not that anybody was really willing to take the man's word for that, but despite his ruthlessness and his casual cruelty, Kayaba had a sense of fairness to him that made him unlikely to lie about the consequences of him being killed by the Clearers. And he'd promised that with his death, they'd have access to the Cardinal, the system that kept Aincrad running, even if it'd been massively reduced during the Transition from the intricacies of what it'd once been.

In the end, it didn't really matter. Regardless of everything else, they needed to kill Heathcliff.

It wasn't just a matter of removing a blot on the name of the KoB, or vengeance against him for trapping them all in SAO for all that time, but also simple practicality. As long as Heathcliff lived, it wasn't impossible to imagine that he could leave his throne at the 100th Floor, and – if he did – he could likely cause untold havoc before anyone managed to stop him.

Kirito shook those thoughts from his head and concentrated on the moment.

Yui was cheering him on, and his opponents were just as tired as he was. He just needed to push a little bit further, and then maybe they'd all be ready.

Ready to kill a madman and depose a king from his throne.

XXX

Dying had been kind of hectic, but actually 'being dead' seemed fairly serene. Which Shiroe would easily admit to fit in with the stereotypes surrounding it all.

Sure, most people considered death a one-way kind of deal, but then most people weren't Adventurers. It was still a bit weird to experience it for the first time, staring up at the planet from the surface of the moon.

Akatsuki was there too, and the signal for 'follow' slipped past his fingers before he even realized it. She straightened, a small smile flickering on her face as she fell into step with him, and for a moment the world suddenly seemed right again.

He hadn't even realized that his usual pace had shortened a long time ago in order to make it easier for her to keep up. It was more noticeable now, after the time spent apart. And he wasn't sure if it was comforting or embarrassing to see his habits echoing their peculiar relationship.

The lighting in this place was strange, cold and harsh but gentle and dark at the same time. He was pretty sure that he would've stabbed Naotsugu if the man had popped out of the woodwork, simply because he wouldn't be able to recognize him.

But Akatsuki still looked like Akatsuki. A little bit ethereal perhaps, a little bit freer to smile and laugh outside of her traditional ninja-clothes.

Actually, Shiroe wasn't entirely sure how he could recognize her so easily, how everything slid into place the moment he saw her face. It was-... Ah, perhaps he might've been staring at her sleeping face a few too many times. That might explain it. He should really stop doing that, even if she always looked so peaceful-...

Shiroe sighed and turned his attention away from that subject and towards battles that he might actually win.

Two weeks into December already, he supposed that they hadn't completely missed the chance to return home before Christmas, if they worked hard at it. But it was entirely possible that their raid-group would simply break apart under the strain of a Total Party Kill, especially considering the idea of fighting multiple raid-bosses at once. That was just unfair.

And if they broke here, there wasn't much choice but to return to Akiba in defeat. Which Shiroe very much disapproved of, even if it'd mean that they'd have plenty of time to catch the entirety of whatever Christmas festival Maryelle managed to think up. It might be nice to go to a festival that he _wasn't_ in charge of the paperwork for, for once.

It'd be an interesting change of pace.

XXX

Whoever had designed their attack-strategy was insane.

Despite the rumors, Kirito had never soloed a Floor Boss. He'd been a major contributor to Gleam Eyes back on the 74th Floor, but it'd already been worn down by the first group of attackers, and then Klein and Asuna's combined charge.

So whoever thought up the crazy idea that he could – completely on his own – take on _two_ of Heathcliff's summoned Bosses at the same time-... Well, either they had an awful lot of unsubstantiated trust in his abilities, or they were completely insane.

Of course, it was entirely possible that as long as he simply kept them distracted long enough for the others to whittle down Heathcliff's health-bar, it'd still count as a win. It wasn't like Heathcliff would be coming back to life, regardless of if his summoned Bosses killed them after he went down. Not unless he'd been lying about him having already made sure that he wouldn't respawn into this world.

So Kirito just needed to focus on keeping alive, without losing the aggro of the equivalent of two separate Floor Bosses at once. All the while keeping a careful eye out for the possibility that Heathcliff might disengage from his own fight in order to flank him.

Thankfully, the Bosses of SAO had never been all that imaginative. They were huge, could survive massive onslaughts by sheer amount of HP, were able to dodge around almost anything, used sword-skills, fought cleverly, and hit like a truck. But it wasn't like they really had any abilities beyond that. There was no weird magical bullshit being thrown his way, just swords.

In order to beat them, he only really needed to be better than they were when both of them were working together. And his guild was counting on him to do that, trusting in him to be able to protect their backs whilst they dealt with Heathcliff through sheer overwhelming numbers.

That was the plan, and Kirito couldn't quite keep the bloodthirsty smile off his face. He could hear the battle-cries of the rest of the Knights of the Blood, with Asuna's roar briefly drowning out the clashing of swords.

Christmas Eve was fast approaching, and it'd been a very long time since Kirito had last had a guild to look forward to it with.

So, no matter what. No matter how impossible the battles they asked him to win was, he wasn't going to fail them. Not this guild. This one, he was going to protect. Insane and impossible battle-strategies or no.

It shouldn't be that hard to kill two Floor Bosses at once all on his own. He'd just need to be the absolutely strongest player in the game, and then prove it beyond doubt.

He could totally do that.

XXX

When they finally tumbled down the stairs to meet the rest of the Clearers, Kirito was pretty much being carried.

He couldn't really feel his arms, and his knees kept buckling under his weight, but everyone was grinning at him as they dragged him along with them, so it wasn't like they minded it.

It was Asuna who spoke up, face tired but somehow unfathomably noble in the evening light of the 99th Floor. "Heathcliff is dead." She declared, eyes fierce as she stared down the other guild-leaders of the front-lines. "The duty of the Knights of the Blood is fulfilled. You may proceed."

There were a lot of weird faces going around, scrunched up and slack-jawed and poker-faced all at once.

The leader of the DDA was the one who answered. "Oh no you don't!" He glared at her. "You totally got to fight the Final Boss all on your own. You're _not_ leaving us to deal with the goddamn politics of this shit!"

Klein nodded seriously, along with a great many others, but Kirito got the strangest feeling that Klein was trying not to grin.

"If you get to pull rank and call dibs, then _you_ can deal with being the one in charge!" The man grinned evilly. " _Long live the Queen_!"

Kirito's jaw dropped, and Klein folded in half from laughing, as the rest of the front-line echoed the man's declaration.

Even so, despite how loud it got as people cheered in celebration of their not-yet-coronated new queen, it still couldn't quite drown out Asuna's hysterical pleas about 'not wanting to deal with the paperwork'. But it came pretty damn close.

XXX

He could see Aincrad far in the distance, but it was Akiba that drew his eyes as they approached.

They were home. Finally, after nearly six weeks worth of being away, they were returning home.

He could distinctly remember a few hints about the changes in the political climate whilst he'd been away, but there wasn't much worth lingering on. Aincrad had gone into isolation again, and though they still let trade pass through their ports, nobody had been able to contact the two councils governing the mountain-kingdom for almost as long as Shiroe had been gone.

Considering the timing, Shiroe would guess that it had something to do with the Clearers finally reaching the 100th Floor, though he couldn't really fathom why that would've caused them to break contact with the rest of the world. When asked, the citizens of Aincrad simply insisted that the councils were far too busy to be bothered.

Honestly, Shiroe was willing to guess that it was the Council of Guilds that was too busy with whatever had been uncovered at the 100th Floor, and that the People's Council simply remained as hilariously ineffectual as it'd always been rumored to be. Then again, considering the ridiculous stories about the latter council being founded by the single worst politician in the history of mankind, it was highly likely that any sort of rumor at all from Aincrad's side of things would always be massively overblown.

Still, he might've expected Aincrad breaking off contact for a week or two, as everyone stumbled around trying to figure out what to focus on when the entirety of Aincrad had been Cleared. But for over a month? That was unsettling.

Unfortunately, there wasn't much they could really do about it except wait and see. Aincrad was Aincrad, and it'd solve its own problems in its own way. They were far too independent to do otherwise.

Landing and slipping out of the gryphon's saddle, Shiroe very deliberately didn't roll his eyes at Tetra's antics with Naotsugu. He was sure that there wouldn't be any serious trouble between them and Maryelle, if only because Tetra was actually quite perceptive to people's moods, no matter how obnoxious the healer might act.

Minori and the rest looked healthy, which probably meant that nobody had done all the paperwork that would've no doubt accumulated in Shiroe's absence. So he had that to look forward to.

And he only really realized that Akatsuki had taken up her position behind him when his shoulders suddenly unwound themselves on their own. He trusted her, to the point where his body apparently considered her near-undetectable presence to be almost as relaxing as passing out on a couch somewhere.

Glancing back at her, she looked older somehow, more mature, and it took him a moment to remember that she'd been there when he'd died. That she'd been fighting just as hard as he had been, and that she'd probably finally found friends of her own.

That maturity however, didn't stop her lips from twitching in wry amusement at his halfway aborted a signal that hurriedly moved into a 'stand easy'. It was the closest thing they had to 'hello', and the aborted gesture had come very close to mixing 'stay' with the more abstract 'wish' which was supposed to represent a hopeful scenario that did or did not come to pass.

Again, their made-up language was very much in its infantile stage, but he was pretty damn sure that Akatsuki could guess that what that signed had been meant to be.

Especially since she smiled, vocally welcomed him home, and signed the same damn signal back to him with an added 'my lord'.

Staring at the stubborn little ninja who'd sworn herself to him, Shiroe couldn't quite stop the blush rising on his cheeks. So instead he immediately turned his attention as far away from those kinds of thoughts that he could, and turned to address the rest of his guild.

Regardless of everything else that could've ended better. He'd made it back before Christmas Eve, at least. And he was kind of curious about what mad plan Maryelle had come up with to celebrate it.

XXX

Kirito wasn't sure whether to laugh or cry about everyone deciding to insist to make Asuna's coronation into a big ceremony.

On the one hand, watching his fiercely practical wife dress up in ridiculously extravagant clothes and be blatantly uncomfortable about it was kind of hilarious. On the other hand, it meant that he somehow ended up being the one juggling Yui and the paperwork with the guild, since Asuna was so obviously busy.

The Vice Commander thought he was being sneaky about it, always giving Kirito the paperwork with lines like 'having Asuna look it over', but adding that he 'wouldn't be opposed' to having Kirito's opinion on the matter as well. And considering how Asuna had to nearly walk over bodies to have the time to visit the bathroom some days, that in effect translated into 'Kirito, look this over for me'.

It would've been sneaky, and he might've actually fallen for it, if it hadn't been such a fantastic plan that he'd thought of doing it for himself. As it was, he was mainly just annoyed that the man kept dumping important papers in his lap when half the stuff in it was information about stuff that he already knew.

That is, until the man cheerfully handed him the result of a vote that the rest of the guild had done entirely without his input.

'Her Majesty, Queen Asuna of Aincrad' was long enough of a title for any person. It'd sound really awkward if they put in a 'Guild-Leader of the Knights of the Blood' in there to go along with it, in no small part because everyone would start expecting them to be on the receiving end of some very blatant favoritism from the woman in question.

So obviously Asuna couldn't really be classified as the guild-leader any more, even if the KoB had cheerfully set themselves up for becoming the new 'royal guard' in order to remain by her side. But every guild needed a guild-leader, and it was KoB tradition to dump that position on some poor noble sucker who couldn't abandon them if he tried. Or, that was what they had decided that the tradition was, anyway. They'd only ever had two previous guild-leaders after all.

The conclusion had been to give Kirito as much responsibility as they could, and see what he did with it, and then cheerfully announce that he'd already been promoted the moment he got used to his new workload.

Kirito hadn't quite expected _that_ , because he hadn't really thought to consider worrying about the succession in the guild, let alone come up with a plan to dump it on some poor noble sucker who wasn't him. He'd clearly been massively neglectful in his contingency plans.

But all of that meant that he was nearly as busy as Asuna was, because apparently the other guilds had been holding off on answering tons and tons of diplomatic issues whilst the KoB readied themselves to kill Heathcliff. So now that everything was back to normal, Kirito was dragged off to sit in on meeting after meeting where the DDA kept trying to be utter dicks to everyone – it was who they were, and they'd long since embraced that fact wholeheartedly.

Everything was still massively inefficient, because nobody had really managed to wrestle the People's Council's assembly of _over a hundred different representatives_ into a smoothly functioning machine. Consisting as it did of both representatives of each respective Floor, and various bigger groups that operated on a inter-Floor basis, it added up to a whole lot more people than one might assume. And the sheer mass of people meant that even the simple idea of each of the members of the People's Council being given a chance to make their voice heard on any given issue would take them weeks of delegation.

The Council of Guilds was much more efficient, dealing with less people, and having mostly mutated into its current form with a little tweaking of the Clearers' Council of SAO. Everything in there was mostly variations of routines that had been allowed to settle into place over the years trapped in the death-game.

Still, everything was slated for settling down for their family of three by the end of Christmas. Until the DDA revealed their gleeful attempt to drive them into new depths of madness, by showing off their recently-completed parade-schedule.

They'd actually been forced to write in the hours that Asuna and her royal guard would be allowed to sleep during the several weeks of non-stop parades. It was something along the lines of four hours a day, if they figured out how to eat whilst sleeping.

Kirito secretly swore to himself to master that technique one of these days, because it would basically mean combining his two most favorite pastimes into a single one. But that didn't stop him from seeing the massive problem.

They were seriously going to die, if they couldn't figure out a way to argue that they didn't actually have time to go gallivanting around on parades – no matter what the DDA and their supposed expertise on morale had to say about it.

Everyone knew they were just being dicks, but that didn't change the fact that _someone_ had to make the parade-schedule, and it was kind of a massive undertaking that nobody wanted to expose themselves to. Even when Asuna held them at sword-point – they'd tried it, but the guild-leaders were clearly made out of sterner stuff than most.

All in all, they didn't actually have a good reason to refuse the parade-idea or at least shorten the amount of them without insulting the Floors that they tried to skip, which would leave the People's Council wailing to high heavens about discrimination. And there were cat-herders with easier jobs than dealing with those guys when they were on their _good_ behavior.

So they desperately needed an excuse that wasn't personal, and that all of Aincrad could agree on the importance on – even if only grudgingly – in order to dodge out of as much of the DDA's hellish schedule as they possibly could.

The obvious conclusion was to simply leverage 'international relations' into the conversation and then go on a well-earned vacation somewhere that wasn't in Aincrad.

And what do you know, Akiba had apparently decided to hold some huge Christmas festival that the Queen of Aincrad couldn't possibly avoid attending when they'd clearly sent an invitation to it.

It was highly likely that nobody in Akiba had actually expected anyone important to grab onto that invitation, and that the invitation had been more a polite nod to say that whoever Aincrad wanted to send their way wouldn't be refused entry. So they were probably going to be utterly panicking over the idea of Aincrad having a queen, let alone that said queen was planning on passing out on their couch for a while.

Along with her entire guard of course, and the princess, because royalty should try and stick together to make it less of a headache for their poor overworked bodyguards.

It was the perfect plan, and Kirito even made sure that each of his guild-members brought their own pillows for the trip. After all, it wouldn't do to miss out on their scheduled relaxation-time because of lumpy or inadequately provided sleep-necessities.

A guild-leader had to think about these kinds of things.

XXX

Shiroe very nearly groaned when he heard the news.

Princess Rayneshia was a very laid back kind of person, whose main hobby seemed to consist of not crawling out of bed that day. Which meant that – despite being royalty – the princess was really quite easy to accommodate.

A visiting queen – along with her entire contingent of guards, and a princess – on the other hand was something completely different. There would be security concerns both for the safety of the visiting royals, but also for the city of Akiba as a whole, considering that they would be bringing an outside force within its walls.

Perhaps it might've been easier if Akiba had still had its magically powered guard-force, but that had recently been disabled in order to stop the serial killer running amok, and was likely to remain inoperable for the next few decades at the very least. All of which meant that the queen's guards would theoretically be capable of causing an awful lot of damage, should they so desire.

So, even ignoring any potentially grating personalities, there was a dual-layered security necessary to deal with the visit. And most everyone who could provide it were either away with Crusty dealing with the goblins, or still kind of caught up in Maryelle's plans for the Christmas festival.

Which meant that Shiroe would need to step in and pull off a miracle within the first day of coming home from a full raid.

Was his luck really awful, or had the world somehow adapted to his ability to 'do the impossible' until it refused to let anything be easy? Shiroe wasn't sure, but he was definitely going to complain about it, even if only inside of his own head.

Akatsuki carefully turned her face away, her shoulders shaking as she somehow managed to divine what was going through his head.

Shiroe sent a brief glare at his own hands, who'd betrayed his deliberate silence by signaling his desire to stomp on someone for giving him even more paperwork to deal with. He really needed to get that under control, if only because Akatsuki having a direct path into his mind would likely mean that she'd figure out why he kept wincing whenever she sounded out-of-breath.

His traitorous imagination had never really recovered from the tango-incident.

XXX

Akiba was peculiar and kind of familiar in a distantly nostalgic way.

It wasn't that Kirito had ever been there before, but rather that the people in it and the businesses that had sprung up around it were a lot like the ones a person might find back in Tokyo. Sure, there was a bizarre twist to things, considering the monsters and the magic, but the core of the attitude and inventiveness was there.

Aincrad didn't have anything at all like this. During the two years they'd been trapped in SAO, things had been forced into some very specific patterns that didn't really lend themselves to the kind of chaotic businesses that could be found in Tokyo. And by the time the Transition removed that forced restraint, they'd all grown a bit too used to Aincrad to really change anything about it.

So, despite how their origin-world was the same as that of the Adventurers, Akiba was very much a foreign experience to the citizens of Aincrad.

Still, they weren't there to sight-see, but rather to find a couch to crash on for a couple of nights until the DDA's parade-schedule was a completely lost cause. Not that anyone had probably been willing to explain that to Akiba, considering the somewhat nervous reception that they got on their arrival.

Asuna was a queen now so she'd been stuffed inside of an extravagant carriage for the trip, and with a contingent of thirty people surrounding it, it became something like a miniature parade. With all of the curiosity that such a spectacle obviously drew.

Honestly, Kirito was still feeling a bit sore about his guild sneakily promoting him to guild-leader, but he could admit that his displeasure was in no small part because the promotion meant that he no longer had any excuse whatsoever for not wearing the uniform. And he'd _liked_ wearing black.

It kept Asuna from snickering at him.

Yui looked utterly thrilled to be there though, seeing how she kept craning her neck and turning every which way in her seat in order to look at their surroundings properly. And most everyone else of the guild were clearly amused by her reaction to it. Kirito could relate, seeing as his daughter was the most adorable daughter there had ever been.

XXX

Shiroe easily recognized the uniforms of the Knights of the Blood, though this was the first time he saw the colors on Kirito. Then again, he wasn't seeing the uniform on Asuna, so maybe there was a correlation there.

Actually, Asuna had a crown on her head, and wait wouldn't that mean-... Ah, so Aincrad had a princess of the People, and a queen of the Adventurers. That might've made a lot more sense if Shiroe had the faintest clue about the political climate of Aincrad, but nobody really knew anything at all about its government and politics.

Shiroe was pretty damn sure it was because Aincrad was still in the stage of 'inventing traditions', meaning that they couldn't really explain what they were doing until they'd already done it at least once before. But he'd still be much happier to have some kind of insight into the process of it all.

He knew there were two councils. One for the Adventurers and one for the People. And now he knew there were two royals, but considering the differences in titled rank, he wasn't sure if they were considered the only members of two different royal families, or if they were considered as two members of a single royal family.

Also, he was pretty sure he remembered Asuna being a guild-leader who dressed in the KoB uniform, and even if she still had some of the colors, what she was wearing definitely wasn't the guild's uniform. So it was entirely possible that she might not technically be a guild-leader any more. Especially since, from the way she was fidgeting with her dress, Shiroe was guessing that it was a formal kind of thing related to her new position rather than anything she'd actually chosen for herself.

Even their daughter's formerly simple white sundress had become somewhat extravagant since the last time Shiroe had seen them. Though the girl in question seemed far too curious about Akiba to care much about what she was wearing.

And speaking of their daughter, Shiroe couldn't quite help the narrowing of his eyes as he once again considered the girl's title naming her as one of the People. She was vulnerable. More so than any other single piece of the government of Aincrad, and Shiroe couldn't help but worry over how some unscrupulous type of person would likely be willing to aim for 'the weakest link' in order to unbalance Aincrad's current stability.

He kind of wanted to share the contract he'd developed for Rudy with the family of three, just to be able to get some peace of mind, but there was no telling how the People of Aincrad might react to their Princess of the People suddenly being an Adventurer. Not to mention the personal and political ramifications if anyone were to ever find out that Shiroe actually had a way to turn someone of the People into an immortal Adventurer.

That was the kind of thing that might see nations beating down their doors with demands to join their ranks, and there was the distinct and unsettling possibility that some of them might abuse the concept of immortality terribly. After all, being immortal meant that you were 'divine' according to the culture of the People of the Land, and there always tended to be some really nasty individuals showing up in history whenever someone claimed divinity over someone else.

It was a shame, because telling them of it would probably also be a weight off of the shoulders of the princess's parents. But he wasn't really all that good at trusting people at the best of times, even if he was trying to get better at it, and there were a great many ways it could go wrong. Hopefully, he'd be able to get a better view of the risks and gains involved long before someone was crazy enough to attack the young girl, so that he'd actually know what to do about it.

Still, despite the unusual and uncharacteristically pompous arrival, there was no denying that Asuna had the regal bearing of a natural-born leader. And the impression from the whole procession was really quite impressive. It truly looked like a foreign leader visiting Akiba, despite Shiroe's certainty that Aincrad hadn't had royalty at all until a few scarce months ago.

He wasn't sure if that meant that they were good actors, or if they believed their new positions to be justified somehow. Considering how little they knew about the actual details surrounding Asuna's coronation, an election by the citizens of Aincrad was about as likely as a tyrannical grab for power from her side.

Shiroe would've bet on it being more of an election-process, but it wasn't like anyone had actually received a decent answer when asking, so it was hard to tell.

It didn't look like Argo had come with them though, so at least they'd be safe from having Serara stare heartbroken at any of Nyanta's interactions with the young woman. That had been uncomfortable for everyone, in no small part because she'd really looked to be on the verge of tears when those two had started in on their demonstration of tango.

Thankfully, Shiroe wouldn't be dragged into the paperwork-mess that Maryelle's Christmas festival was likely to become, seeing as he'd be babysitting the visiting dignitaries and their entourage. But even so, he got the distinct feeling that this whole visit would be a headache and a half, all on its own.

XXX

There weren't really any schedules for their visit, though Shiroe had made sure to have an open spot in his own should they actually want some kind of tour of Akiba and the festivities. There weren't even any political reasons for the visit that Shiroe could see, unless they were planning on talking about trade-agreements – and then he was fairly sure someone would've warned them about the details, so that they could make the correct people available to deal with it.

So he'd decided to drop by once the contingent had settled in, and see where the conversation went from there.

The man in the KoB uniform shrugged apologetically. "It's been a long trip."

Shiroe felt a skeptical eyebrow rise to the occasion, because surely he wasn't trying to imply that a bunch of Adventurers would've tired out from a carriage-ride that couldn't have lasted more than a few hours. Shiroe knew perfectly well that Adventurers could march and fight through an entire night and day without any real problems – as long as their health-bar wasn't depleted.

The man sighed, before laughing sheepishly. "Right, right. Well, it's been a pretty intense few weeks for all of us. So they're catching up on sleep."

Shiroe adjusted his glasses. "I know that there were rumors about the councils being busy, but I'm curious how that translated into you crowning a queen."

The man stared at him for a long moment, before shrugging again. "It's not like it's really a secret. But... basically, nearly six weeks ago, we found Kayaba."

Shiroe felt a chill crawl down his back. He'd sort of assumed that the madman who'd trapped the Adventurers of Aincrad in SAO had been a nonentity, that even if he'd been able to access the death-game, he hadn't followed his victims into Elder Tales.

"Yeah." The man nodded, face solemn as he watched Shiroe' expression. "He was the 100th Floor Boss, and-... Well, to make a long story short, Asuna-san pulled rank on the rest of the Clearers to let our guild get the first clear shot at him." He made a weird motion with his hand. "And when we won, the rest of the Clearers figured that if she could actually get away with pulling rank on them, then they should just make it official and name her 'queen'."

'Won'. It sounded like such an innocuous phrase. But Shiroe knew full well what it meant. To defeat a Floor Boss, one needed to kill it. And considering that the man didn't follow it up by telling about how they had to drag Kayaba out of the cathedral and into a prison-cell or something, the madman probably hadn't survived being killed.

He was standing in front of someone who'd killed a man. Or at the very least helped put the man in his grave. And Shiroe wasn't even sure he could fault him for that. Kayaba deserved a lot of things for what he'd done, and none of them were nice.

But still, this was definitely the face of a man who'd been to war. A veteran soldier, when Japan hadn't seen war for decades.

It was a little bit unsettling, but Shiroe had more important things to wonder about. "How did she pull rank? I thought all the guild-leaders were equal?"

The man's expression didn't change at all. "You'd have to take that up with her majesty."

So apparently there were still _some_ secrets involved in whatever had happened during those weeks, though it was entirely possible that the man simply didn't know. He had a good poker-face.

Regardless, if they'd been so busy for all that time... why in the world had they suddenly decided to come to Akiba?

The man tilted his head at the question, before grinning in amusement. "Well, see. Somebody needed to make the parade-schedule. And the DDA volunteered."

Shiroe frowned. Not entirely sure how that was an actual explanation, especially considering that the procession earlier that day hadn't really classified as a parade by any real measure.

The man shook his head, still grinning. "They made it on the assumption that we wouldn't actually need to sleep during the several weeks of it. And so our gracious guild-leader vehemently opposed it."

Shiroe was suddenly reminded of the fact that he'd seen Kirito wearing the KoB colors, and wondered if that had anything to do with the 'guild-leader' the man was referring to no longer being Asuna. It wouldn't make any sense that he called her by the title of royalty one moment and guild-leader the next, most people stuck to a single form of address when talking about people.

"So, you're visiting Akiba, because you don't want to attend the parades in Aincrad?" Shiroe tried to summarize what the man was saying.

The man nodded, looking amused. "Everyone knew the parade-schedule was useless, but nobody wanted to put in the work necessary to fix it, and the DDA mostly just made it like that because they're dicks."

"Ah! You said a bad word!" The voice of a young girl piped up from behind the man, causing him to do a full-body flinch.

"No I didn't!" The man waved his hands, panicked. "I said 'digs'!" He tried to correct himself by forming a senseless sentence.

Yui narrowed her eyes at him. "That makes no grammatical sense at all! I know what I heard."

The man met her glare head-on, before visibly wilting. "I-... I'll teach you another one, as long as you don't tell anyone and _never_ use them where your parents can hear you."

Yui grinned, childishly menacing face disappearing behind a sunny smile. "Yay!"

Shiroe got the distinct feeling that the princess was a very sneaky type of kid. He couldn't say that he disapproved.

Ah, Minori could probably learn a lot from watching the adorable little girl wrap her bodyguards around her fingers. He'd have to make sure they met at some point. It wouldn't do to hamper the potential of his own apprentice through negligence, and it was very important to know how to properly manipulate someone into doing what you wanted them to do.

Akatsuki stifled a laugh, and Shiroe belatedly realized that he'd accidentally signaled that particular train of logic to her.

He glared absently at his hands, again swearing to himself to get that fixed before he accidentally told Akatsuki about why he needed cold showers in the mornings. It wasn't his fault that his subconscious was so-...

Shiroe very deliberately cut that thought off at the knees, and then drowned it. But that didn't stop the blush from rising on his face.

XXX

For the first time in seemingly months, Kirito allowed himself the peace of mind to kind of nudge himself awake an inch at the time, curled up next to his wife.

Asuna looked as beautiful as always, but there was always a certain kind of absentminded wonder when he could wake up to her sleeping face. He knew better than to try and kiss her awake though, because she usually managed to headbutt him in her sleep if he tried.

They still had a lot of things they ought to be doing, and probably a number of things they simply wanted to do on top of that. But right now... this was enough.

Kirito needed to get more used to the sword he'd received from the Bosses that Heathcliff had summoned. He knew that it was a much better sword than the meager thing he'd gotten his hands on after Lisbeth's sword broke against their first charge on Heathcliff, but the weight was a little bit different and he couldn't quite get rid of the feeling that he needed to practice with it.

Asuna needed to decide whether or not she should train her Unique Skill at all. It was a powerful one, and Kirito doubted that anyone would blame her upon hearing about it, but it had been the reward for getting the Last Attack Bonus on Heathcliff. And there was a chance that someone would classify it as Asuna 'inheriting' it from Kayaba.

If it'd been up for a vote, Kirito would've placed his on training, but that was mostly because he didn't like the thought of Asuna not using every skill in her arsenal to keep herself safe. Even if it _had_ once been Heathcliff's own Unique Skill.

From what they could gather, Holy Sword wasn't so much a tank-skill as it was focused around the concept of 'interrupting attacks' rather than 'blocking' or 'dodging'. Things like blinding lights that would cause the enemy to flinch away, leaving them open for a counter-attack from the very same sword that blinded them. If Kirito were to describe it, he'd classify it as a 'dueling'-type Unique Skill, rather than one designed for fighting monsters.

But to train in it or not was an argument for later, and they would probably have to wade through a bunch of completely unrelated political problems before they could really begin to dedicate any of their time to that.

Aincrad was blocking the entry-way into what ought to have been Tokyo Bay, turning it into a lake. And though trade had resumed, it was still awkward for ships to have to unload on one side of the mountain-castle and load the same goods on another ship on the other side. There'd been talk about making a channel of some kind, but it wasn't like anyone really wanted to dedicate themselves to digging a several-kilometers-long trench that was deep enough for ships to pass through. Not without a good reason at least.

There were also rumors that Beast Tamers had managed to grab and tame some pretty impressive monsters since the Transition, monsters belonging to Elder Tales, and that it was entirely possible that they could somehow convince those monsters into doing the actual digging. But there'd have to be a long and complicated discussion about where that channel should be dug, and how it should be used once it was finished.

That was another one of the many disadvantages with becoming a guild-leader. Kirito actually had to keep an eye on those proceedings now, because even if Asuna were to be given the final word on most issues, he didn't want her to work herself into the ground simply because he couldn't convince the Council of Guild's to do what it'd been created for.

He supposed that it had been inevitable for him to become a political figure, considering how his original infamy as a 'Beater' had long since begun tapering off into fame instead. It was probably that damn 74th Floor Bosses that'd done it. Or maybe it'd been more due to any truth there might be to the rumors that he'd heard from Argo about various people whom he'd helped out over the years being very upset at hearing his name 'slandered'.

There was of course the possibility that his infamy had tapered off simply because he happened to be the father of Yui, and how everyone loved her. But whether they adored his daughter or not, Kirito sincerely doubted that something like that would convince them to like _him_. Even if he had a niggling suspicion that his daughter was secretly a genius who could tug at people's heartstrings and play them like a fiddle.

If it weren't for the fact that he was rejecting those thoughts outright, on behalf of his daughter being the cutest and most innocently wonderful girl there had ever been, Kirito would've been very proud of her for it.

XXX

 **A/n: Yui is really smart. And the DDA are probably more like trolls than dicks, but everyone's already gotten used to calling them that, so it can't be helped.**

 **And yes, Asuna inherited the Holy Sword, because she was the one who landed the finishing blow on Heathcliff. As for the sword Kirito picked up during that final battle? It's called Durendal, and has a ridiculously high durability.**

 **This is the final chapter. After this, there's an Epilogue along with a few Omakes, all from non-Shiroe/Kirito POVs.**


	5. Epilogue and Omake

XXX

Chapter 5: Epilogue and Omake

XXX

Disclaimer: I don't own anything.

XXX

When Rayneshia first met Queen Asuna of Aincrad, she hadn't been sure what to expect.

The woman was her age, an Adventurer, and the absolute authority of an entire nation.

Adventurers were a weird bunch at the best of times, even if they were usually friendly – as long as they didn't wear glasses, Adventurers who wore glasses were evil down to the last. Their culture was strange and kind of somehow awkwardly blatant about impoliteness, almost as if they knew _exactly_ how to be polite to someone, and took great pleasure in not being such.

Then there were the weird traditions, celebrations, fashions, and the godsend that was Miss Isuzu's amazing Academy of Music. Rayneshia didn't overly care about most of those things though, excepting whenever the Adventurers decided to semi-forcefully involve _her_ in whatever schemes they cooked up that time around.

And once she got her hands on that Evil Glasses Monster, she'd strangle him for abandoning her to this mess. There weren't _nearly_ enough nap-times, considering what had been advertised, and Crusty wasn't even _here_ , and-...

Still, strange as they could be, and despite how Rayneshia kept getting tantalizing glimpses of their bizarre thought-process until she almost thought that they might start making sense – until they proved her utterly wrong in her assumptions – that was really only a part of it.

There weren't queens in Yamato. Princesses, oh yes. All the better for marrying them off in order to solidify alliances. That was their lot in life, and if they managed to grab power through the 'rule' of their children, that was usually expected to some extent. But an actual queen? A woman who ruled a country by her lonesome?

Rayneshia hadn't ever even really considered that to be possible. Though she'd be the first to admit that it sounded like an awfully unpleasant thing to do. She'd seen the amount of work it took to keep even a single city running, let alone an entire nation, and she had no desire to land herself in such a horrifically exhausting position.

Late to bed, early to rise, with a great many important meetings, and without any time for naps. Truly, a most unfortunate existence.

But Queen Asuna was around the same age as herself. A few years older, perhaps, but certainly not old enough to inherit a throne excepting the most dire of circumstances.

How was she supposed to greet her? Subservient, yes. Politeness demanded that much at least. But was she supposed to treat her like the 'queen' whose title she wore, or the 'king' whose power she held? And were different traditions expected of her, as the woman was an Adventurer? How did Adventurers treat their own royalty? Or would attempting to mimic that be seen as presumptuous?

Rayneshia had accepted this damn position of Ambassador because it was supposed to keep her _away_ from all that annoying politicking, but there it was. This was what she had been raised to, and even uncomfortable habits that she'd defied more than once, were hard to entirely break away from.

So, when she'd first met the Queen of Aincrad, Rayneshia had been quite nervous.

Until a cheerful little girl launched herself at her knees, giggling about finally meeting a real princess.

Which had obviously been when the girl's father had decided to crack a joke about 'mirrors being useless conversation-buddies'. And that was how Rayneshia met the Princess of Aincrad and her father, the Head of the Royal Guard.

The age difference wasn't even remotely what it ought to have been, but then the Princess was of the People, and the man was an Adventurer, and honestly she wasn't even going to try to figure that one out.

Of course, then the Queen appeared and smiled in exasperation at both her daughter and her husband, and invited her in for tea. Which she then proceeded to prepare all on her own, because 'her tea was the best'.

Rayneshia would've been worried about arrogance, except the woman was clearly both very talented in the kitchen, and kind of startlingly warm-looking for such a regal figure.

She'd expected her to be like one of those warrior-queens from legend, fierce as a typhoon and stuff like that. And she'd landed herself with a happy young woman who hummed cheerfully as she bustled around the kitchen.

It was all very... domestic.

And if she hadn't been expecting the Adventurers to never make any sense whatsoever, she probably would've despaired over the whole mess.

Still though, there'd always been something strange about how the Adventurers treated those from Aincrad. Everyone knew of it, of course. Even she herself had heard rumors that Aincrad had originally been a 'trap' that had imprisoned all who visited it, designed by a madman who'd figured out how to limit Adventurers to a single life. As if they were merely of the People.

There were even Adventurers who'd lost family to that gigantic castle, though whether they'd survived until it had appeared at their shores-... Well, sometimes they had, other times they hadn't. She'd heard of reunions, but hadn't ever really seen one herself, so she couldn't imagine what they would be like.

Not that any of that really changed her situation any. Crusty was still off and disappeared somewhere, the Evil Glasses Wearing Adventurers were always scheming, and most everyone else made absolutely no sense at all.

But from the way the Head of the Royal Guard would wax poetically of napping under trees in summer-weather, regardless of the season, Rayneshia could admit that – even if they probably wouldn't ever make any sense – Adventurers were definitely worth befriending.

If only because they were sure to lead her to places that were perfect for catching a nap.

XXX

Tohya didn't think he'd ever be able to forget the final mass-suicide of the Odyssey Knights.

He hadn't really been present during the actuality of it, thankfully, but he'd seen the ships filled with people arriving at Aincrad's docks. Hundreds of people begging Aincrad to allow them to die permanently.

In the end, maybe half of those people had actually gone through with it, and Tohya was still unsure of exactly how sickened he was by the idea that the Queen of Aincrad had _allowed_ it. That she'd been willing to let those people kill themselves, instead of actually trying to help them.

Sure, half of them had ended up returning on their ships back to Minami, humbled by the realization that even now they still feared death too much to take that final step. But there were so many people who hadn't returned, who would never return.

Silica had tried to explain it to him, but he wasn't sure he understood it. Something about how there would always be people who couldn't handle being dragged away from their previous lives. Most of those people had killed themselves within the first month of being trapped in SAO, and back then at least they'd had a _chance_ at returning to their lives.

Even if through some miracle they managed to establish contact with their home world, they would've all probably already been declared dead by then. The lives they were so desperate to return to would be in shambles, and there wasn't really anything Aincrad could do about any of it except give them the ability to make their endless suicides stick, should they wish it.

So the queen had given the Odyssey Knights the chance to use the sacrifice-system of Aincrad to kill themselves permanently. And then breathed a heavy sigh of relief when at least half of them backed out before the end.

Tohya wasn't sure if the queen had really been relieved, but Silica kept insisting that the woman was a good person. Personally, he was fairly certain that the girl just saw the best in people, regardless of everything else. Silica was nice like that.

The Odyssey Knights as a guild disappeared after that, but a lot of the survivors were still obsessed with finding a way back to their world. Even if they'd given up on believing that the path home was to die.

It was hard to say whether Minami was better off without them, considering that they _had_ been going around fighting monsters and protecting people, but according to Shiroe there hadn't been any really noticeable problems cropping up with their disappearance.

The People of the Land had been more horrified about it. About immortals giving up their immortality, and about Aincrad being able to help them do it. There'd been some kind of fallout, and Shiroe had been running interference for a bit until it'd all calmed down.

Tohya's main source of information on the political spectrum was his sister, and Minori hadn't really been paying attention, seeing as she'd been lost to the world for nearly a month, buried underneath the paperwork that the Golden Retriever kept generating. Tohya wasn't even going to try to understand the many numerous details were involved with the running of an entire academy. Though he was more than willing to help Rudy drag the two recluses out into the open air for a few hours here and there, to keep them from forgetting what it was like to actually be alive.

Serara would help sometimes too, but she was generally either busy with her own guild, or training to become stronger, or a better chef, or a better dancer. And it kind of kept adding up until she was really busy almost all the time. Even if the girl could still find plenty of time in her schedule to hang around Nyanta for seemingly no reason at all.

Not that anyone actually _believed_ that there wasn't a reason behind it, except maybe Nyanta himself, seeing as Serara was kind of ridiculously obvious about her affections.

Isuzu would still dissolve into giggles whenever Rudy showed up and declared that it was time for her to get some fresh air and 'take a walk' with him. But considering that Tohya had gleefully given Rudy a rope – to 'threaten' Isuzu with the prospect of literally getting tied and up and dragged out into the sunlight – he couldn't say that he disapproved of it.

It was definitely kind of hilarious to have the flamboyant mage show up with his 'leash', and begging for a walk.

Minori usually needed to be hauled out from behind her desk with actual physical force though. Or by having Silica pout at her, but that was kind of unfair because Silica was-...

Well, Tohya was still kind of confused about why the pout worked on _Minori_ , but he knew that it worked on himself mostly because his heart-rate tended to get erratic, and he'd walk into things. Which, actually Minori would do sometimes too, but probably not for the same reason.

Minori liked boys, after all.

Even if she'd abandon her precious paperwork in a heartbeat, the moment she heard Silica had returned to Akiba after one of her trips. It wasn't like that was completely unheard of, and Minori tended to do the same whenever Shiroe stopped by to ask for help with something.

She'd continue doing that paperwork of hers if Akatsuki showed up though, and was actually likely to toss things at the woman until she left, calling her a nuisance who cheated unfairly. Which Tohya had never entirely understood, because cheating tended to always be 'unfair', but he guessed that it had something to do with the way that Akatsuki had at some point harnessed the ability to make Shiroe walk into walls by swinging her hips.

Cruel as it might seem to say it out loud, Tohya's sister had never really stood a chance against whatever it was that those two were to each other. The ninja and her lord. And Tohya could swear that sometimes it seemed as if they spoke an entirely foreign language between each other, even when they wouldn't actually say a word. It was creepy.

Still though, Isuzu and Minori were keeping the biggest academy in Yamato running almost entirely by themselves. That was impressive. Even if Isuzu played more figure-head, idealist, and motivational speaker; whereas Minori did most of the actual paperwork.

Rudy could still be struck silent some days, staring in awe as the People who came to study music there experimented with their own new songs, improvising with instruments and lyrics and pretty much anything that came to mind. And Tohya was proud of them. Both for starting this, and for keeping it going even now.

He didn't love music like Isuzu did, but he liked it well enough, and it was wonderful to see so many people gathering in one place to share their love of something with each other. So he wasn't really surprised when his sister would randomly shut herself away from the outside world and bury herself in her work. After all, she desperately wanted to keep Isuzu's and all their students' dreams alive.

Silica seemed to understand that too, even if she didn't do much more than smile happily at them for it. She smiled more at Minori than Isuzu though, but that was probably because Isuzu had Rudy around to smile for her.

And even if Silica had kind of unofficially joined their party – much like Serara had done – all those months ago when the Beast Tamers had all grouped together to go out and explore the world for monsters to tame, Tohya was pretty sure that he and his sister were Silica's best friends. Isuzu and Rudy were usually off in their own weird world, and Serara was usually busy elsewhere, so it stood to reason that it would be the two of them who ended up showing Silica around Akiba whenever she had time for it.

From what little he'd heard when meeting other Adventurers from Aincrad, Silica was a lot friendlier with the two of them than she was with pretty much anyone, except maybe Kirito. But it was a bit unfair to compare her relationship with the guild-leader of the KoB – and Head of the Royal Guard – with their own, seeing as she admired him like a kind of distant big-brother-figure who'd swoop in and save her in her direst hour.

It'd be like comparing Isuzu's and Minori's relationship to Minori's crush on Shiroe. Totally unfair.

Still, them being Silica's best friends had both advantages and disadvantages. Namely, it was really awkward for Tohya to have to deal with the girl deciding that they needed a hug. She was their best friend, and it was bad enough that Tohya stood the chance of screwing that up because of his stupid hormones, without including the fact that his sister was usually also included in the hug. Awkward didn't begin to describe it.

He might love her dearly, but he _really_ didn't need his sister to figure out that he had a crush on their best friend. If she ever did, she might try forcing him into confessing that to Silica, and then everything could end up going to hell. And, really, Tohya was perfectly fine with things as they were. He didn't need anything complicated like a girlfriend, because he had a weird kind of family always hanging around, and he had a really wonderful best friend.

He was more than happy with that.

And if he was perhaps a little bit too aware of how Silica's shoulder would bump into his own when they sat next to each other-... Well, that really wasn't all that important on the whole.

XXX

Nobody was entirely sure what 'Aincrad's Landing' was named after.

There was the general idea of it being the place in Aincrad where ships 'made land', seeing as the area it included was mostly harbor. But there were also people insisting that it was named after 'the place where Aincrad landed', which might help explain why some of the channel and the harbors cropping up around what used to have been an inlet into Tokyo Bay was also included in the area so named.

In the end, most attributed it to some guy getting clever and the name sticking, and scoffed at idea of thinking further on it. Which, admittedly, was probably what had happened, just like it usually did with names like that.

Still, there was no denying that it was a flourishing place, having grown exponentially once it became apparent that the varied climates of Aincrad's Floors were ideally suited for a large number of foreign and hard-to-get plants. And it certainly hadn't dwindled when the neighboring Akiba started to reach for the title of 'Capital of the Arts', luring even more people towards that city and the trade-hub next to it.

It'd taken Argo some time to piece all of it together, but in hindsight their violent reaction to Lord Marves had actually served to stabilize the political climate of Yamato. Aincrad had been a new player on the field, and everyone were very hesitant to cross them. Add to that the sudden upswing in revenue as Westelande traded the goods produced there onwards outside of Yamato, and they had very good reasons to not rock the boat by picking fights.

That obviously wouldn't have stopped any of the schemers from trying to think of a way to claim Aincrad and its luxuries for themselves, but the ruthlessly violent reaction to Lord Marves, followed by Asuna revealing a way for Adventurers to kill themselves permanently-... Considering that nobody was sure if Aincrad would figure out a way to use that offensively, they'd been far more trouble than they would've been worth. And their already-existing trade-agreements with Maihama and Akiba would've likely meant that any attack on _them_ would've drawn Aincrad's ire as well, whereas most everyone in Eastal considered them too odd to really attempt to include them in any true alliances.

It really was quite neat, the way that a third force had been enough to force an unstable peace into a more solid one.

Also very useful, because most of the Clearers had seemingly retired once Heathcliff had fallen, and they probably wouldn't appreciate any outside pressures forcing them back into battle. It was actually fairly peaceful, even if Argo was pretty damn sure that a great many Clearers were putting a lot of thought into the idea of going out adventuring and raid-participating in the dungeons of Elder Tales.

There'd been some noise about investigating the Aincrad's 'basement', but most Clearers were simply too over-leveled to apparently find that 'thrilling' enough to be entertaining. Even if there were some interesting rumors coming from there, these days.

Honestly though, Argo had been more intrigued by the mid-Floor players starting to venture outside of Aincrad in order to find new and interesting things without having to grind their way through level after level in order to climb Floors. Or, in the case of some of the smiths and other craftsmen, to investigate new materials and artifacts.

For example, Argo had been dragged off on a reconnaissance-quest with Lisbeth, in order to find a way to make 'a sword that Kirito would use instead of that shitty monster-drop'. Which had been both hilarious in concept and utterly mind-numbingly boring to actually investigate. Argo wasn't a smith, and she most definitely didn't enjoy spending hours upon hours talking about magical theory and different metal-strengths.

Though at least she'd been able to drop by the Golden Retriever and grab a dance-partner or two to keep herself from going completely insane. Most of them were beginners, and she ended up being temporarily roped into being a tango-teacher, but it was a most welcome change from having to listen to Lisbeth talking shop.

She even got to meet up with Nyanta again, and it was endlessly entertaining to tease that blatantly obvious girl. Why, one of these days she was going to have to properly teach Serara the moves for tango herself, and then throw her at Nyanta. Though that day was probably a few years down the line, because Argo wasn't entirely sure whether the girl would survive it as she was. And Nyanta would probably have a very unpleasant reaction to having someone so young vying for his affection.

Or, at least, Nyanta would probably have a very unpleasant reaction to the realization that he'd woken up next to someone of Silica's age, sans clothes, one morning. He was a good man, and further proof that cats were forever superior to dogs.

Regardless of the details of that relationship however, after the mind-numbing mess that had been Lisbeth's investigation, Argo no longer accompanied anyone on anything that wouldn't be immediately interesting to herself, 'best information-broker in Aincrad' or no.

But that didn't mean that she didn't keep a close eye on the ones who did travel outside. So she knew perfectly well that Silica – the idol of mid-Floor players – had more or less eloped with a certain very influential guild from Akiba. Oh, the girl wasn't officially a member, and the guild was a really small one for a non-Aincrad guild, but it was rather obvious that she'd made friends there that she intended to keep.

Or 'more than friends' if Lisbeth's gleeful cackles were to be believed. Though Argo wasn't going to get involved with whether or not there was some kind of romantic triangle going on between Silica and a pair of twins. She was a respected information-broker who most definitely didn't deal with _gossip_.

Even if she _did_ have it on good authority that Silica had asked Kii-bou for advice about 'how you knew you were in love'.

Argo wasn't touching that mess with a ten-foot-pole.

XXX

 **A/n: Using the Kirito/Shiroe POV felt unnecessary, because they're both kind of 'unmoving' after the last chapter. So this Epilogue is for everyone who's been curious about what is happening out of sight from those two.**

 **And yeah, the main reason this if where it Ends is because the Plot has by now been thrown so far out of whack that I don't really have a clue on how the politics and events of Yamato and the rest of the world might develop.**

 **Thank you for all your reviews. They've been wonderfully helpful in reminding me of various aspects that I needed to include. I mean, Rayneshia's part in the Epilogue hadn't even been** _ **considered**_ **before someone mentioned her in a review. So yeah. A great many thank yous for all of your infinitely helpful comments.**

 **Below are a few scenes that are mostly just there for shits and giggles.**

XXX

(Omake)

XXX (Tetra's Handsome Samurai) XXX

"I'm sorry Nao-chan, but my heart has been stolen by another!" Tetra proclaimed dramatically, flailing about like she usually did.

"That's the greatest news I've heard all month." Naotsugu deadpanned without looking up from the paperwork Shiroe had suckered him into finishing. "Now shoo."

"Ah! If you must know, Tetra-chan has fallen in love with a noble samurai from a foreign land!" Tetra continued as if he hadn't said anything, because she seemed to live for these kinds of moments.

"I'm sure we can get you a visa. Have a nice _long_ trip." Naotsugu gritted his teeth.

"Nao-chan, you're so romantic!" Tetra hugged him, clinging on like a particularly unpleasant barnacle. "Since you insist, I'll introduce you!"

Naotsugu took a brief break in the middle of trying to pry the 'idol' off of him without resorting to a crowbar – he didn't actually _have_ a crowbar available, otherwise he would've definitely resorted to it – in order to glare at her. "Whoever agreed to dating you is either a masochist or a loony."

"Hey! I resent that." Klein appeared in the doorway, grinning. "I could also be 'desperate'."

Naotsugu stared at the man most famous for his supposedly horrible attempts at diplomacy, and for hitting on everything with legs. "You poor misguided fool."

"Klein-chan!" Tetra waved at the 'samurai from a foreign land'. "Come here and hug Nao-chan! He needs it!"

"No, I don't!" Naotsugu returned to trying to pry the annoying self-proclaimed idol off of him.

"But Tetra-chan is leaving you for an even more handsome man." Tetra shook her head in tearful and completely unnecessary sympathy. "And Maryelle-san doesn't hug you as well as I do. So you're going to be all pent-up without any kind of outlet at all."

Naotsugu wasn't entirely sure if that had been an intentional play towards innuendo, or if Tetra was innocent of at least that particular annoyance. Either way, Klein just snickered at the sight of them.

"Don't worry, Tetra-chan. I'm sure there'll be plenty of times for you two to catch up on hugs." Klein said from his position by the doorway, a weird air of fondness to his expression.

Tetra pouted, and batted her eyelashes at the other man. "But Klein-chan, I have to hug him lots and lots. Otherwise his shoulders gets all stiff and cranky."

Klein nodded, as if understanding this explanation and proclaiming it a reasonable and wise such – instead of the incessant ramblings of a crazy wannabe-idol. "We all have crosses we must carry."

Naotsugu decided then and there to make Tetra's new boyfriend's life hell. Though he also made a careful mental note to never do so within sight of Tetra, lest she take it as him 'being jealous'.

He was perfectly fine with Tetra disappearing off somewhere and no longer going around picking fights with Maryelle about who got to hug him the most – though a jealous Maryelle could be cute too. In fact, he wouldn't have minded terribly if Tetra had actually decided to move to Aincrad, though he'd known he'd get disappointed on that front from the get-go.

Naotsugu also wasn't entirely sure why everyone had been looking at Klein funny when he'd been introduced to the guild at large, or why the man had shrugged at their disbelieving gazes and said something along the lines of him being 'equal opportunity' in regards to pretty people.

Naotsugu kept getting the distinct feeling that he'd missed a joke somewhere, but he wasn't sure what it was.

XXX (An Unfair Cheater) XXX

Akatsuki had never really considered herself to be 'pretty'. Cute, yes. She could usually pass for 'cute' without much issue, but never 'pretty'.

So perhaps it wasn't all that surprising that she couldn't quite help succumbing to the confidence-boosting rush of watching her lord dissolve into a stuttering mess whenever she swung her hips in his general direction.

Sure, even Minori might have more curves than she did, but it wasn't as if that girl had ever really been a rival for Shiroe's affection. Crush or no crush.

It wasn't really that Akatsuki had been very confident in her lord being attracted to her – though she'd gotten quite smugly certain of that ever since he'd started signing about 'damned dancing' and blushing helplessly whenever she faked being out of breath – so much as she'd quickly figured out that Shiroe was more likely to legally adopt Minori as a little sister than he was to stare at the girl's cleavage.

A rival for Shiroe's attention, certainly. A rival for his affection, to some extent. A rival in romance? Not really, no.

Akatsuki wasn't entirely sure if she was supposed to be feeling guilty about that, considering that Minori was all of fourteen years old. What the girl might feel for Shiroe was no less real because of her age, true. But it wasn't as if Shiroe could really reciprocate the girl's feelings without coming off as a cradle-robbing pervert.

Which, actually, might help explain why Nyanta was so oblivious about Serara's blatant interest. The girl might have a few years on Minori, but she was still firmly in her mid-teens, in comparison to Nyanta's supposed 'middle age'. That kind of age-gap-... well, there was a reason why there was that 'half your age, plus seven'-expression. It might sound like a decent enough age-difference once everyone involved were past their thirties, but with a teenager it was mostly just disturbing to imagine.

Either way, there'd been an insurmountable wall blocking Minori's desire to capture Shiroe's heart. And Akatsuki hadn't had anyone else aiming for her target, even if she was vaguely suspicious that Henrietta had very deliberately avoided making a move of her own, so somehow Akatsuki had managed to keep his attention all to herself. Not that Akatsuki was entirely sure what she ought to be _doing_ with it.

Laugh and sing and dance a jig on the rooftops, obviously. But she'd already done that. And the question had more to do with how she was supposed to 'start' being in a relationship with her lord.

Follow him around? She already did that. Swing her hips in his general direction? She did that too – and it was equally satisfying every time he wandered into a wall because he'd been paying attention to it. Be affectionate with him? She'd been doing that for ages. Tell him that she was in love with him? She-...

She couldn't possibly do _that_! That was much too-... too _something_!

And besides, wasn't the man supposed to be doing the hard work? Except, no. Shiroe was kind of an idiot about social stuff, wasn't he? He kind of just kept everything on the inside until he'd figured out how to either deal with it or simply internalized a way to ignore the problem entirely.

She should know, she'd been catching glimpses of his inner monologue through some rather unorthodox hand-signals that he seemed to be inventing on the spot. Like the 'damned dancing' one, which was more about 'timing' and 'movement', with an added modification towards 'swearword', and didn't so much seem to represent 'dancing' in itself as it did Shiroe's associations to it. Namely, Akatsuki was pretty sure that it might be related to how hard Shiroe tended to blush whenever someone brought up the word 'tango'.

Which actually might've been a bit annoying – because she didn't actually know tango herself, and Argo's demonstration had left her feeling somewhat inadequate in her own femininity – except sometimes Akatsuki wondered if the sign wasn't so much 'damned dancing' as it was 'rhythmic movement'. As in, the kind of rhythmic movement that you _really_ did not need to think about when you were supposed to be concentrating on other things, and not lock yourself in the bathroom to have an emergency-related cold shower.

Not that she was ever going to seriously reconsider naming the 'damned dancing'-sign into anything else. Her heart wasn't ready for that kind of-...!

Besides, if she did that, she'd never be able to look her lord in the eye ever again. And that would be awful, because he actually had kind of really pretty eyes. Even if they were kind of beady, and usually hidden behind the light reflecting in his glasses.

Akatsuki wasn't entirely sure if she was more, or less, attracted to him when he smirked with evil intent, than when he smiled kindly. She figured it was about on the same level, but there seemed to be very different _kinds_ of attraction involved.

And she was infinitely grateful that she knew better than to keep her hands where Shiroe could see them, because otherwise they'd probably have to fight over who got to use the emergency-related cold shower first.

After all, it wasn't like they could use it together-...

Akatsuki tilted her head. Suddenly deeply in thought.

Perhaps-... Perhaps she should start keeping her hands where her lord could see them?

XXX


End file.
